Social Studies Textbook Evaluation

Exploring Textbooks

This week the class worked in groups to evaluate a social studies textbook for a particular grade level. My group chose a fourth grade New York Social Studies textbook along with the teacher's edition and a social studies workbook. Our goal was to evaluate each text to see if it matched the intended grade level and followed the National and State Social Studies standards. From doing this project, we discovered that it is extremely important for teachers to explore the textbook prior to using it in class. While the texts that we evaluate were extremely useful and clearly organized, other groups found that their texts were too difficult for the grade level and often confusing. After participating in this activity, I see why it is so important for the students to have a good textbook and supporting workbook.

For this project, we also were asked to use the Fry Readability Formula to determine the grade level of the textbook. By determining the number of sentences per 100 words and the average number of syllables per 100 words, we were able to come to the conclusion that are textbook was on the fourth grade reading level. We were surprised because the Fry Readability showed that that the book was actually on the grade level that it claimed to be. In some cases, the Fry formula shows that the reading level for the textbook is much higher then the book claims. I found this formula to be very useful and I think that it is really interesting to compare.