One hundred undergraduate business students completed a questionnaire designed to determine their reactions to a traditional and a "flashier" textbook format. Before completing the questionnaire, subjects spent several minutes examining two business textbooks--one an older textbook with black ink on white paper, narrow margins, and few…

Reports on an analysis of seven tests in use for CSE Human Biology to determine the technical vocabulary to which pupils are exposed. Lists the frequency of occurrence of every term, outlines the scheme used for classifying terms, and presents a selected vocabulary of terms considered to be the most popular. (GS)

A study analyzed two basal reading series to determine if they depicted realistically the role of the career woman as she exists in society. A list of female careers in the 1989 editions of Houghton-Mifflin and McGraw Hill reading basals for grades 1 to 6 was compared to the career categories of the "United States Bureau of Census,…

A study examined text-based scientific concepts and described how those concepts were elaborated in three high school biology textbooks. The three textbooks were aimed at different student audiences: non-college bound students, special education students, and high school students at all levels. A concept analysis was established for each text, and…

The purposes of this study were to assess the usefulness of a variety of readability formulas in predicting the relative difficulty of passages, and to explore the contribution of pupils' background to text difficulty. Subjects were 285 special education students in grades 1-9, 117 of whom were based in rural and suburban Minnesota (MN) and 168 of…

An analysis of the syntax of economics textbooks was undertaken to (1) provide real-language examples of the difficult grammatical structures being taught in an advanced economics reading course, and (2) construct a factual database of the nature of economics textbooks. Five texts representative of those typically used in introductory economics…

The three papers included in this report address typography for graphic communication, typographic access structures for educational texts, and typography as macropunctuation. The first paper considers the consequences of an aesthetic bias in the literature of typography, and identifies two misleading assumptions about textbooks; i.e., that print…

To determine how high school journalism textbooks published from 1980 to 1985 deal with mass media and to what extent they deal with journalistic skills versus historical and theoretical content, a content analysis was made of nine comprehensive textbooks published during that period. Specific content areas that were analyzed in the historical and…

Thirty-one secondary level social studies textbooks, published between 1974 and 1984 were examined to determine the characteristics of those identified as heroes and heroines, the extent to which they were presented, and ways in which they were presented. Five institutional settings (family, religious, political, economics, and sports) and five…

General guidelines for the writers of instructional materials are provided, with emphasis on clarity in the presentation of textual information and related graphic aids. Some basic points about typographic planning are presented for typographers and printers, as well as writers, and it is suggested that some typographic practices may actually…

The Fry Graph for Estimating Readability (Extended) and George Magginnis' formula for passages shorter than 100 words were used in an investigation of the reading levels of 18 mathematics textbooks produced for grades one through six by three major publishers. The results indicated that the readability levels of the textbooks were inaccurate. Few…

To determine whether the distribution of male and female main character roles (sex dominance) differed significantly in the 1976-1978 editions of basal readers and supplementary textbooks from that found in the 1974-1976 editions examined by Gwyneth E. Britton and Margaret C. Lumpkin, an analysis of more than 3,700 stories was undertaken. The sex…

Expanded abstracts and critical analyses are given for each of 14 research articles. Studies on instructional strategies or methods are reported in five reviews; three report studies concerned with concept attainment; three review studies in measurement of cognitive abilities; one study is on the effect of a laboratory for college freshman math…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether children could learn a new concept using only a textbook for guidance. A sample of all 639 sixth grade students in one school district was randomly broken down into four treatment groups. The first group received one class period of instruction from their teacher on the addition of one place…

Two college freshman required texts were chosen for analysis of readability and of cloze performance on selected passages. One cloze passage was administered to each of 218 students enrolled in General Psychology and Principles of Biology courses. Dale-Chall readability levels were separately calculated for the same passages. Reading levels of the…