Resources for Science Literacy: Curriculum Materials Evaluation
Choosing Good Instructional Materials
Deciding which
curriculum materials to use is one of the most important professional judgments
that educators make. The recommendations of textbook adoption committees influence
instruction for years to come, and the daily decisions teachers make about
which teaching modules or textbook chapters to use—and how to use them
well—largely determine what and how well students learn.
Such important decisions require a valid and reliable method for evaluating
the quality of curriculum materials. Merely examining the topics covered by
a textbook or a teaching unit is not sufficient to determine whether the material
will actually help students learn important ideas within those topics. What
is needed is a process for evaluating instructional materials that gets below
the surface by focusing intensely on precisely what ideas the materials
aim at and how likely the materials are to help students learn those
ideas.
Project 2061 has been developing such a process for evaluating curriculum materials
with funding from the National Science Foundation and in collaboration with
hundreds of K-12 teachers, curriculum specialists, teacher educators, scientists,
and materials developers. Field tests suggest that Project 2061’s evaluation
procedure will not only serve schools’ materials adoption purposes,
but will also help teachers revise existing materials and guide developers
in the creation of new materials. Moreover, as users testify, using the procedure
enhances their understanding of the content and how to teach it.
Judging Both Content and Instruction Against Learning Goals
For many years, there was nothing against which to judge the importance of
a material’s content. Now, with Project 2061’s Science for
All Americans (1989) and Benchmarks for Science Literacy (1993),
and national standards for mathematics and science, educators can make more
thoughtful and coherent decisions about what to teach and why. Equally important,
Project 2061’s curriculum-materials evaluation procedure provides a
valid way of estimating the likelihood that students will learn that content.
A central finding of Project 2061’s work is that 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. In developing its curriculum-materials evaluation
procedure, Project 2061 observed that judgments about the quality of instruction
in general, without evidence relating to the specified learning goals, often
led to overestimates of what students would learn.
That is why, in addition to examining the content of a material, Project 2061’s
procedure calls for evaluators to analyze the material’s instructional
strategies for each targeted learning goal. Evaluators consider whether
a material’s purpose is clearly portrayed, how it treats commonly held
student ideas, whether it provides firsthand experiences with phenomena and
questions to guide student interpretation and reasoning, how it develops scientific
ideas, whether it promotes a good learning environment, and what provisions
are made for assessing student progress toward specific learning goals.
A New Curriculum Reform Tool
Resources for Science Literacy: Curriculum Materials Evaluation introduces
a new way of thinking about and working with curriculum materials. Its thorough,
systematic approach brings a new level of consistency to decisions about materials,
instruction, and assessment. This new tool will be produced in a print/electronic
format and will include
- a detailed description of Project 2061’s materials-evaluation procedure
and its uses, along with the rationale and an overview of the research
supporting this analytical approach;
- commentary on important issues related to curriculum evaluation in general
and Project 2061’s analysis procedure in particular;
- a summary of cognitive research—including and supplementing that
in Benchmarks—relevant to teaching and learning specific
ideas and skills;
- a small collection of evaluated materials, including bibliographic information,
summaries of activities, descriptions of each material’s intended
audience and goals, evaluation reports, and samples from the instructional
materials themselves; and
- tutorials and workshop plans for applying the procedure in different settings
for a variety of purposes.
Putting the Procedure into Practice
Educators will find Resources for Science Literacy: Curriculum Materials Evaluation
useful in selecting new curriculum materials. In addition, the many schools
and districts that are unable to replace their current materials can use Project
2061’s evaluation procedure to detect shortcomings in those materials and
to help them decide whether and how to make improvements.
Over the longer term, use of the Project 2061 evaluation procedure can encourage
textbook publishers and other materials developers to make revisions in their
products. At the same time, educators trained in using the procedure will
create a demand for materials that are aligned with widely accepted goals
for science learning such as those in Benchmarks. The developers themselves,
made familiar with the procedure, will be better equipped to create new materials
around science literacy goals.
The materials-evaluation procedure is also a powerful professional development
tool for teachers. Its careful focus on how instruction can be designed to
serve specific learning goals helps teachers to recognize the importance of
such goals and instructional design in both curriculum materials and their
own teaching. Its insistence on citing explicit evidence of a material’s
alignment with learning goal adds rigor and reliability to the analysis, emulating
the link between evidence and argument in scientific inquiry. Also, by calling
for a team approach to the analytical task, it fosters professional collaboration
that will strengthen the whole enterprise of curriculum reform.
