About the Content and Instructional Analyses

(For more details about what the reviewers looked for in the Content and Instructional Analyses, see Project 2061 Analysis Procedure.)

Content Analysis

For the Matter and Energy Transformations topic, a Content Analysis report for each textbook presents the reviewers’ findings in the sections Map: What the Reviewers Found, Alignment, Building a Case, Coherence, Beyond Literacy, and, when relevant, Accuracy. For the topics Cell Structure and Function, Molecular Basis of Heredity, and Natural Selection and Evolution, one Summary Content Analysis report summarizes the content analysis findings for that topic across all nine high school biology textbooks evaluated. Each Summary Content Analysis includes Topic Maps, Treatment of Key Ideas, Building a Case, and Coherence. You can read each Content Analysis in its entirety or click on each section individually. You may find it helpful to print out the maps and refer to them as you read the rest of the Content Analyses.

Instructional Analysis

Each Instructional Analysis report describes how well the instructional strategies in the evaluated textbook support students’ learning of the key ideas for a given topic. Reviewers analyzed instructional effectiveness using a set of research-based criteria developed by Project 2061 and organized into seven categories, each of which focuses on a specific aspect of instructional support. The Instructional Analysis provides the reviewers’ rating for each criterion, followed by an in-depth discussion of the indicators that the reviewers used to judge how well the textbook meets the criterion. You can read each Instructional Analysis in its entirety or click on each section individually. In addition, you can click the icon next to each criterion to show or hide text that lists the indicators of meeting the criterion.

Page Reference Abbreviations

In the Content and Instructional Analyses, the in-text page references to the evaluated textbooks have been clarified by the use of letter suffixes: “s” denotes the student text (as in “p. 114s”) and “t” denotes the teacher text (as in “p. 114t”). When the text in a particular excerpt cites both student and teacher pages, as in the case of assessment questions and suggested responses, the suffix “st” is used (as in “p. 114st”).