In today's classrooms, textbooks serve as tool and tutor, guidebook and gauge.

Teachers
throughout the world use texts to guide their instruction, so textbooks greatly influence how
content is delivered .identified textbooks as playing an important role in making the leap
from intentions and plans to classroom activities, by making content available, organizing it,
and setting out learning tasks in a form designed to be appealing to students.
To make the most effective use of a textbook, however, teachers must decide which
textbooks are appropriate for their needs. A teacher needs to determine the extent to which
a textbook focuses on and is aligned with a coherent set of significant, age-appropriate
student learning goals that the teacher, school, or district has identified as integral to the
understanding of and progress in a particular academic subject. They must also assess how
well a textbook's instructional design effectively supports the attainment of those specified
learning goals. The only way to gain this information is through careful evaluations of
textbooks and other curriculum materials.

Content Analysis
The first step in evaluating a textbook is to identify the learning goals with which the
textbooks should be aligned

Instructional Analysis

The procedure requires textbook reviewers to focus only on those textbook activities and
lessons that are aligned with the identified content learning goals, and to examine the
specific guidance provided to help students learn that content. To evaluate the quality of
instructional support reviewers use specific criteria within each of the following categories:
• Identifying a Sense of Purpose. Part of planning a coherent curriculum involves
deciding on its purposes and on what learning experiences will likely contribute to
achieving those purposes. Reviewers determine how effective the material is at
conveying a unit purpose and a lesson purpose and justifying the sequence of
activities.
• Building on Student Ideas. Fostering better understanding in students requires taking
time to attend to the ideas they already have, both ideas that are incorrect and ideas
that can serve as a foundation for subsequent learning. Reviewers determine how
well the material specifies prerequisite knowledge, alerts teachers to commonly held
student ideas, assists teachers in identifying student ideas, and addresses
misconceptions.
• Engaging Students. For students to appreciate the power of mathematics and
science, they need to have a sense of the range and complexity of ideas and
applications that mathematics and science can explain or model. Reviewers
determine how well the material provides a variety of phenomena or mathematical
contexts and makes them vivid to students, particularly through an appropriate
number of firsthand experiences.
• Developing Ideas. Science and mathematics literacy requires that students see the
link between concepts and skills, see them as logical and useful, and become skillful
at using them. Reviewers determine how well material justifies ideas, introduces
terms and procedures, represents ideas, connects ideas, demonstrates/models
procedures and applications of knowledge, and provides practice opportunities.
 • Promoting Student Thinking. No matter how clearly materials may present ideas,
students (like all people) will devise their own meaning, which may or may not
correspond to targeted learning goals. Students need to make their ideas and
reasoning explicit, hold them up to scrutiny, and recast them as needed. Whether or
not the material is effective in promoting student thinking is determined by how much
the material encourages students to explain their reasoning, guides students in their
interpretation and reasoning, and encourages them to think about what they've
learned.
• Assessing Student Progress. Assessments must address the range of knowledge
and skills that students are expected to learn, as well as the kinds of applications
and contexts in which such knowledge and skills are useful. Reviewers determine
how well assessments align with the learning goals addressed in the material,
assess students' ability to apply them, and use assessment to inform instruction.
• Enhancing the Learning Environment. Providing features that enhance the use and
implementation of the textbook for all students is important. Reviewers determine
whether the material provides teacher content support, establishes a challenging
classroom, and supports all students.
To evaluate a textbook, reviewers examine each content-matched activity in light of the
instructional criteria and rate the set of activities according to a prescribed set of indicators
and scoring scheme for each one. Their findings are presented as profiles of judgments for
each learning goal across the set of criteria with evidence provided to support each
judgment.