2061 Textbook Analysis

The present science textbooks and methods of instruction, far from helping, often actually impede progress toward science literacy. They emphasize the learning of answers more than the exploration of questions, memory at the expense of critical thought, bits and pieces of information instead of understandings in context, recitation over argument, reading rather than doing. To see how well the available texts align with Standards and Benchmarks how well they help students achieve them and promote developing new curriculum-materials . Project 2061 has been developed a process for evaluating curriculum materials.Project 2061's evaluation procedure will not only serve schools' materials adoption purposes, but will also help teachers revise existing materials and guide developers to design new materials that support constructivist learning. My study focuses on introduction of Project 2061 Curriculum-Analysis Procedure,with purposes of giving some advices for our educators on how to develop a new generation curriculum materials and the new evaluation procedure,which represent the features of Constructivist instruction and support this kind of learning .For that reason, my research report consists of four major sections,each focusing on one aspect of my work. The first section details Project 2061curriculum-materials analysis procedure,by defining the role of instructional materials,introducing both content and instructional analysis,with more attentions to instructional criteria.The second section explored the research base of the procedure. Project 2061 emphasizes what students should learn, it also recognizes that how science is taught is equally important. One fundamental premise of Project 2061 is that the schools do not need to be asked to teach more andmore content, but rather to focus on what is essential to science literacy and to teach it more effectively.The instructional criteria were derived from principles of learning and teaching such as what students learn is influenced by their existing ideas, people learn to do Well only what they practice doing ,effective learning by students requires feedback,teaching should be consistent with the nature of scientific inquiry science teaching should reflect scientific values,science teaching should extend beyond the school teaching should take its time.These principles were derived from research on learning such as Constructivism theory and form foundation of the instructional criteria .The third section applied the procedure to a stand -alone unit Matter and Molecule.The unit was designed to effectively promote meaningful conceptual change learning to go through the difficult process of conceptual change, reshaping and abandoning ideas or misconceptions that the students have developed from experience and have believed for a long time. The purpose here is to demonstrate usefulness of the procedure and give us some insight into how long it takes to teach for understanding rather than memorization.The final sections provide some references for our national curriculum- materials evaluation and development:Content and quality of instruction cannot be considered separately from learning goals. Credible materials have to demonstrate good instructional strategies that support student learning of the specified goals.From the view of constructivist, curriculum materials should attend to students ideas and help they go through the difficult process of conceptual change.Pedagogical support can be incorporated directly into materials as well as into materials intended specifically for the teacher, such as teacher editions of textbooks. Some of the key pedagogical supports that should become part of instructional materials design include taking account of prerequisite knowledge and student misconceptions, helping students appreciate the purpose of classroom activities and the content they are learning, using representations of abstract ideas to clarifytheir meaning, using phenomena effectively to make the ideas plausible, employ...