Comparative Study On Difficulty Of Senior School Textbook Exercises Between China And America

The new curriculum reform requires to change the "difficult, complex, partial, old" course content. As the important carrier of the course, textbooks represent the overall quality and level of the course, as an important part of the teaching material content, exercises have certain mapping function of teaching material’s overall properties, the analysis of the textbook exercises’difficult can better grasp the setting of curriculum content.As a federal agency, the National Center for Education Statistics focuses on the collection and analysis of education information. In 2001, this agency issue the work report and put forward the model of overall difficulty of science and math exercises. The four evaluation indexes of difficulty are respectively "response type", "setting", "reasoning", and "math skills". This study intends to adopt the model to determine the exercise’s difficulty of China and America biology textbooks. Besides the model for reference, the study also construct the further connotation and determine the effectiveness of the model through the test of reliability and validity.Research results show that the exercises of Chinese biology textbooks are harder than American. The four difficulty indexes set are all statistically significant, and the specific features are below:(1) Compare to American textbooks, the topics of the biological textbook exercises of People’s Education Press are less. Additionally, the content cohesion remains to be improved.(2) The two versions’ exercises which don’t need mathematical processing count to 90%, but for the exercises of People’s Education Press,the problem solution process need higher math skills.(3) As an important element of scientific inquiry, argument is an important approach to improve the scientific literacy, but for the biology exercises of People’s Education Press, the number of questions which need argument are less.(4) Although the biology exercises of People’s Education Press pay more attention to the practical significance of knowledge, but the difference between each module is larger.(5) The biology exercises of People’s Education Press need the students to have higher levels of reasoning.