AAAS Project 2061 Middle Grades Science Textbooks Evaluation
Criteria for Evaluating the Quality of Instructional Support
Category I. Providing a Sense of Purpose
Conveying unit purpose. Does the material convey an overall sense
of purpose and direction that is understandable and motivating to students?
Conveying lesson purpose. Does the material convey the purpose of
each lesson and its relationship to others?
Justifying activity sequence. Does the material involve students
in a logical or strategic sequence of activities (versus just a collection
of activities)?
Category II. Taking Account of Student Ideas
Attending to prerequisite knowledge and skills. Does the material
specify prerequisite knowledge/skills that are necessary to the learning
of the benchmark(s)?
Alerting teacher to commonly held student ideas. Does the material
alert teachers to commonly held student ideas (both troublesome and helpful)
such as those described in Benchmarks Chapter 15: The Research
Base?
Assisting teacher in identifying own students' ideas. Does the material
include suggestions for teachers to find out what their students
think about familiar phenomena related to a benchmark before the scientific
ideas are introduced?
Addressing commonly held ideas. Does the material attempt to address
commonly held student ideas?
Category III. Engaging Students with Relevant Phenomena
Providing variety of phenomena. Does the material provide multiple
and varied phenomena to support the benchmark idea(s)?
Providing vivid experiences. Does the material include activities
that provide firsthand experiences with phenomena when practical or provide
students with a vicarious sense of the phenomena when not practical?
Category IV. Developing and Using Scientific Ideas
Introducing terms meaningfully. Does the material introduce technical
terms only in conjunction with experience with the idea or process and
only as needed to facilitate thinking and promote effective communication?
Representing ideas effectively. Does the material include accurate
and comprehensible representations of scientific ideas?
Demonstrating use of knowledge. Does the material demonstrate/model
or include suggestions for teachers on how to demonstrate/model skills
or the use of knowledge?
Providing practice. Does the material provide tasks/questions for
students to practice skills or using knowledge in a variety of
situations?
Category V. Promoting Student Thinking about Phenomena, Experiences, and Knowledge
Encouraging students to explain their ideas. Does the material routinely
include suggestions for having each student express, clarify, justify,
and represent his/her ideas? Are suggestions made for when and how students
will get feedback from peers and the teacher?
Guiding student interpretation and reasoning. Does the material
include tasks and/or question sequences to guide student interpretation
and reasoning about experiences with phenomena and readings?
Encouraging students to think about what they've learned. Does the
material suggest ways to have students check their own progress?
Category VI. Assessing Progress
Aligning assessment to goals. Assuming a content match between the
curriculum material and this benchmark, are assessment items included
that match the same benchmark?
Testing for understanding. Does the material include assessment
tasks that require application of ideas and avoid allowing students a
trivial way out, like using a formula or repeating a memorized term without
understanding?
Using assessment to inform instruction. Are some assessments embedded
in the curriculum along the way, with advice to teachers as to how they
might use the results to choose or modify activities?
Category VII. Enhancing the Science Learning Environment
Providing teacher content support. Would the material help teachers
improve their understanding of science, mathematics, and technology necessary
for teaching the material?
Encouraging curiosity and questioning. Does the material help teachers
to create a classroom environment that welcomes student curiosity, rewards
creativity, encourages a spirit of healthy questioning, and avoids dogmatism?
Supporting all students. Does the material help teachers to create
a classroom community that encourages high expectations for all students,
that enables all students to experience success, and that provides all
students a feeling of belonging in the science classroom?
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Continued: Helping Students Learn the Kinetic Molecular
Theory
