This paper contains an analysis that sets out to investigate how sustainable development is portrayed in textbooks used in gymnasium level civics education. The study covers three textbooks, all in current use. The paper sets out to explore the relationship between the books chapters on economics and those about environmental issues. The sum of these two parts is in the context supposed to make up the books big picture of green sustainable development, i.e. the ecological aspect of sustainable development. An analytical model will be used to categorise and compare the three textbooks. The method chosen for this is analysis of ideas by use of ideal types. The approach can be said to be qualitative. To achieve a high degree of inter-subjectivity a fairly extensive review of the ideas behind the construction of these three ideal types has been made. There is a short review of the sustainable development as proposed by the national steering documents, a few notions from the economic debate on sustainable development and a overall orientation on current schools within economics. In the overall picture of the governing documents, we find a good support for green sustainability. The idealtypes constructed out of this brief outline are: Business as usual, Ecological modernisation and Ecological economy. The survey found a surprisingly weak link between textbooks and governing documents concerning sustainable development. Two of the books are found to lie close to the Business as usual ideal type, while the third is an example of the Ecological modernisation viewpoint. In all three books there was a neoclassic fundament in the chapters covering economy.

Solving global environmental problems requires a major change of values. As relates to environmental education, worldview, ethics and spiritual issues are important elements. But how are environmental issues included in such school subjects that especially discuss values and ethics? In this article I examine 24 Finnish religious education and ethics textbooks to analyze, to what extent environmental issues are integrated and discussed in them. I conclude that there is confusion about what environmental education can be in societal school subjects. The environmental texts in textbooks do not always draw on the specific content of the societal subject in question but repeat content from the natural sciences. Therefore, I suggest contexts and perspectives for discussing environmental issues that would comport with these subjects and supplement existing environmental education at school.

The purpose of this study was to apply the research technique, content analysis, to the five most widely used United States high school history textbooks. The textbooks were investigated to obtain an objective, systematic, quantitative, and qualitative description of the textual content concerning the period of World War II.The population studied consisted of the five most widely used high school United States history textbooks. Three categories, people, events, and themes were researched in all five textbooks. Each of 126 specific items were coded from each textbook according to inclusion, frequency, magnitude, and direction. Jury validity was utilized, and three professional historians used as independent coders confirmed instrument reliability.Findings1. Events were included in a greater percentage than people or themes.2. American, British, and German political leaders were included more frequently than Russian, Italian, or Japanese leaders.3. Allied leaders were treated more favorably than the Axis leaders.4. The specific items were superficially treated with the textbook lacking indepth presentation of many specific items.Conclusions1. There exists a commonness and similarity among the most widely used United States history textbooks with a distinct lack of differences in that they generally present a series of chronological events and facts.2. The textbooks less than fully achieve the goals established for history courses by state and national organizations.3. Omissions, biases, inaccuracies, and distortions appear in the most widely used American history textbooks because of the forces of the mass market and apparent inadequate usage of current historiography.

The purpose of the study was to analyze current procedures utilized for financing textbooks and related instructional materials by Indiana public school corporations and public school corporations in selected states. Respective practices were examined in order to determine feasible methods/alternatives for Indiana school corporations to use in overcoming the contemporary financial and administrative dilemma which existed in the 1985-86 school year.A descriptive questionnaire was developed from a review of literature and with the assistance of colleagues. Data obtained by the instrument were analyzed using frequency tabulations and percentages. Based on information gained from the study and data collected in superintendents in Indiana, solutions to financing instructional materials for Indiana school corporations were determined.Data collected supported the following conclusions: 1. Public school corporations in Indiana charge fees for textbooks and related instructional materials and are experiencing difficulties in collecting textbook rental and related fees from parents or guardians of school children.2. The use of small claims court for recovering fees is not an effective method for most public school corporations in Indiana.3. Township trustees and/or county councils should pay for textbooks and instructional materials of students whose parents or guardians are declared by the courts to be indigent.4. The current formula for determining textbook rental rates is satisfactory.5. Legislation should be adopted to permit public school corporations to increase revenue in order to finance textbooks and related instructional materials.6. To be in concert with other states in the United States and more specifically within the Great Lakes Region, public school students should be supplied textbooks and related instructional materials without charge.7. The location and size of school corporations have implications to problems existing in public school corporations when administering textbook rental programs.8. Lack of additional finance has restricted public school corporations in implementing new programs to be funded by the general fund budget.9. Based on the average rankings of ten regions, public school corporations in Regions I, II, and VI encountered the greatest difficulty in financing textbooks and related instructional materials. Public school corporations have the least problems in supplying textbooks to school students.10. Based on the average rankings of six enrollment groups, public school corporations in the smallest three groups had the greatest success in financing textbooks and related instructional materials for students.11. Additional costs for school corporations are incurred when interest is paid to publishers for overdue accounts or for installment payment programs.12. School corporations with deficit balances or significantly decreasing balances in textbook rental accounts are in. need of assistance in collecting outstanding fees from constituents and/or means of generating sufficient revenue to account for required textbooks and related instructional materials for students.

This thesis examines how mental hygiene principles were adopted for a student audience through the elementary-level health textbooks series, Health and Personal Development, used in Ontario schools from 1952 until 1963. In particular, I explore the didactic messages pertaining to mental hygiene as they related to girls. The results of this analysis demonstrate that healthy mental hygiene and personal development for girls, according to the textbooks, meant becoming wives, mothers, and homemakers, as their own mothers model. While these roles required many skills and responsibilities, and provided women with a certain amount of agency in the female-dominated sphere, girls were represented in the textbooks as having a limited set of options in life: to emulate their mothers’ feminine domesticity, or to risk a life marred by poor mental hygiene.

Middle School represents a period of transition for the students. This transition is present not only in physical change, intellectual change, and emotional change, but also in terms of the type of reading instruction these students receive. One approach to reading instruction moves from a direct approach focusing on specific skills, to a functional approach of how to apply those skills in the content area classroom. The latter approach is process oriented, and focuses on learning the content by reading and participating in relevant learning activities. The focus of this study was to examine the interaction which takes place among textbooks, instructors, and students in the area of Social Studies within selected middle schools. Three phases were involved in this study. Phase one: Grade six Social Studies textbooks were evaluated using the Singer Reading Inventory, which evaluates the areas of organization, explication, conceptual density, metadiscourse, and instructional devices within a given textbook. Phase two: Visitations to five middle school Social Studies classrooms were conducted over an eight week period in an effort to determine the types of instructional strategies employed by teachers. Phase three: Academic achievement was measured by publisher provided examinations, teacher prepared examinations, or an aggregate of daily scores. Hypothesis one: Social Studies textbooks which are more considerate will result in greater student achievement. This hypothesis was rejected. The achievement of students was inversely related to the results of the evaluation of the textbooks as determined by the Singer Reading Inventory. The rejection of this hypothesis must be qualified in terms of the content the subareas of the Singer Reading Inventory measured, and the type of information the student had to acquire in order to perform well academically. Hypothesis two: Teachers who employ more strategies which are of a functional process approach will enhance student achievement in the content areas. This hypothesis was retained. The preceeding findings may be partially explained by considering the possibility that some classroom instructors compensate for the inadequacies of textbooks by providing more effective strategies and activities which enhance the interaction of information exchange within the classroom. / Graduation date: 1990

The main goal of this study was to analyze the economic concepts materials of Social Studies Learning Areas textbooks of the junior high school in Taiwan for researching the distributive conditions and the content of economic concepts materials in the Social Studies Learning Areas textbooks. The purposes of this study were¡G(1)to explore the meanings of economic education and the relationship between economic education and Social Studies Learning Areas¡F(2)to analyze the differences of economic concepts on all the four editions¡F(3)to analyze the differences of economic competence indicators on all the four editions¡F(4)to induct and research discovery, as references in achievement junior high school textbooks related economic concepts copy editor. This study applied content analysis approach, and the study targets were the Grade 7-9 Social Studies Learning Areas of Grade 1-9 Curriculum textbooks (Nani textbooks¡BRenlin textbooks¡BHannlin textbooks¡BKnsh textbooks )published in 2004. It totaled up to 4 volumes. First of all, the researcher inquired into the references to set up the economic concepts categories and the Economic Competence Indicators translate economic concepts categories, and then, analyzed the economic concepts materials from the words and the illustrations and supplementary materials in the Social Studies Learning Areas textbooks. The conclusions of this study were as follows: 1.Economic education must contain cognitive¡Battitude and skill goals, and has its importance in Social Studies Learning Areas . 2.Speaking of the economic concept analysis, in various editions textbooks all emphasize microeconomic concepts primarily, the proportion which occupies surpasses one half, next is the macroeconomic concepts. 3.Speaking of the economic Competence Indicators analysis, the majority of textbooks all have conform to the economic concepts which the economic Competence Indicators explain, only has partially has not little tallied, demonstrated various editions textbooks¡¦ explanations were not the same , or show up in other subjects and the examination system was not rigorous. 4.Speaking of the supplementary materials analysis, teaching material and so on graph, explanation nouns, mostly can display the supplement assistance text contents ,extend activities as well as the student exercise that all can give dual attention to the diversification, only must consider the arrangement of the time. In accordance with the main discovery and conclusion of this research, suggestions concerning aspects of education organizations, conscientious system of textbooks examination needs to be established were put forward. Follow-up studies were also proposed.

The purpose of this study is to assess the effectiveness of an intermediate textbook titled &ldquo / New Bridge to Success 3&rdquo / , which was prepared by Ministry of National Education as an instructional material for the ninth grade high school students from the perspectives of the teachers and students. The evaluation of the textbook concerned was conducted at macro level on the basis of eleven criteria. Both quantitative and qualitative data were obtained through student questionnaires administered to 336 students and interviews with eight teachers. Frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations were calculated for each item to describe the overall picture of how the students rated the textbook in terms of ten criteria. Data collected through interviews were transcribed, content- analyzed and grouped according to 11 criteria used in this study for the evaluation of the particular textbook The results revealed that both teachers and students felt negative about the most of the characteristics of the textbook. It was found that the reading passages needed to be simplified in terms of both vocabulary load and structures. Majority of the students and all the teachers mentioned that the level of the textbook was not appropriate for the particular age group. It also indicated that the materials failed to consider learning style preferences of the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learner. On the other hand, one of the strengths of the textbook was the artwork&rsquo / s being up-to date and helpful for the students to understand the lesson

Thesis (M.A.)--Creighton University, 2009. / Bluebrary (DSpace). Title from title screen (viewed Mar. 12, 2010). Abstract. Bibliography: leaves 153-155.

Given the current availability of newly-designed textbooks for senior secondary geography teachers and the limited focus on their role in promoting students’ ‘meaningful learning’ advocated in the curriculum reform, a study of teachers’ use of geography textbooks in Hong Kong is particularly timely. Seeking to know the teachers’ practice of using geography textbooks, this study aims at describing and explaining how teachers use the two sets of textbooks, and exploring how their use might be improved in the context of particular classrooms to bring about meaningful learning among students. Two single cases of teacher participants were chosen for study. A holistic case study approach was adopted with a wide range of qualitative research techniques, namely observation, interviews, documentation and journal-writing. Drawing on Remillard’s model of teachers’ role in curriculum development (1999), data collected for each case was analyzed to understand teacher’s activity of using textbooks in curriculum mapping, design and construction arenas. The findings showed that teachers may have different levels of engagement with the textbooks in different dimensions of teaching. Textbooks were generally used as a major source of knowledge in the content determination. Yet, teachers neither used them alone nor followed them slavishly. Driven by the advocacy of constructivist approach to learning, they not only chose relevant tasks from textbooks for students to undertake, but also used the textbooks as one of the sources of geographical ideas or stimulus materials to design the tasks with a focus on different levels of cognition for in-class activities. During the lessons, the PowerPoint files which came along with the prescribed textbooks were widely used for an exposition or reinforcement of students’ work. They were also flexibly used and adapted according to teachers’ spontaneous decisions to varying extents. Teachers’ diversity in their ways of using geography textbooks stemmed from the interaction between their different individual characteristics in terms of experience, knowledge and beliefs, and the textbooks in varying contexts. To a broader context, their diverse ways of using textbooks could be attributed to their different degrees of being influenced by public examination, lesson time, institutional polices and organization norms, professional development opportunities and computer infrastructure, as well as their attitudes towards students’ characteristics. It was worth noting that the constraints in the circumstances of teaching, such as time constraints for lesson preparation, sometimes made teachers difficult to perform their ideal teaching and learning roles. According to the three principles proposed by Hooper and Rieber (1999:258-260), certain ways of using the textbooks could generate the opportunities for supporting students’ meaningful learning were unveiled in this study. First, teachers who chose the essential content, selected important tasks and designed meaningful tasks based on the text and illustrations could provide opportunities for students to have active processing of lesson content. Next, the use of multitext approach in the group enquiry tasks, oral presentation and debriefing sessions could allow students to expose to information from multiple perspectives. Third, the presentation of content in the form of cases or examples, and the use of tasks or case studies in the textbooks for authentic work, issue-based or case-based enquiry learning could build upon students’ knowledge and life experience in meaningful contexts. Teachers’ interaction with textbooks did not guarantee the generation of meaningful learning outcome. To improve the ways of textbook use for students’ meaningful learning, several feasible strategies were identified. To cope with students’ limited capacity of working memory, teachers may slow down the pace of presentation, avoid students doing unnecessary tasks, and use suitable modes and structures of the presentation of information for students with different cognitive styles. Selective use of materials and props provided by the publishers could avoid the repetition of content and increase students’ interest in processing of lesson content. To increase students’ mental engagement in the tasks, their learning attitudes should be improved through interesting tasks in the textbooks, rewarding practice, team competition and small group work. It was also important to connect the content in the tasks to their existing knowledge through providing conditional knowledge, making the text more comprehensible to students and using visual images with more explicit information. Some higher-order questions should be added in the ready-made tasks to cater for diverse students’ abilities. Group work could be used to help the lower achievers in these tasks. Regarding the use of supplementary materials, teachers should use PowerPoints and their own resources together to sustain students’ engagement in the cognitive tasks. Since it was not easy to transfer knowledge through animations, words should be better presented as narration than on-screen text. To increase group engagement in the tasks, group work should be properly managed. Finally, teachers should make students familiar with real-life contexts before they started engaging them in tasks. In conclusion, teachers can use the textbooks to provide opportunities for students’ meaningful learning, but this sometimes became unattainable because of difficulties in the circumstances of teaching. Findings suggested that more efforts should be made to improve initial teacher education programme, increase teachers’ professional development opportunities, provide more useful offerings in the textbooks, relieve the problems of time constraints for lesson preparation and inadequate lesson time, and teach students’ enquiry skills and collaborative skills. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Education