Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Widely used by teachers, textbooks interpret curriculum policies in a way that reflects views of authors, publishers, and reviewers. Their content implies what knowledge and skills students ought to achieve. Often, aspects of textbook content are overlooked. There are features of publishing industry and of textbook development process that can result in a situation that filters out depth of content and controversies in favour of conventional values, concepts and thinking. At present time, three publishers produce over 90% of textbooks for Ontario secondary schools. This gives them enormous power as interpreters of curriculum, while limiting curriculum resource choices that teachers have. Moreover, four salient features of textbook development process contribute to a filtered view. This filtered view has two characteristics: a hidden curriculum (i.e., implicit values that reflect dominant and hegemonic ideologies) and a presentation of information (i.e., explicit content) that is superficial and limited. When students interact with textbooks in uncritical ways, result may be nothing less than indoctrination. Such indoctrination can produce dogmatic, closed-minded graduates (Lammi, 1997, p. 10) with limited cognitive views which are at odds with autonomy in classroom and inconsistent with a democratic vision of education. Scope This paper will focus solely on secondary school context in province of Ontario after 1998, when new curriculum policy was introduced across province. I will not attempt to perform content analysis of textbooks but will instead draw historical data on changes in industry and on my experience as an author to describe publishing industry and provide an account of textbook development process. For purpose of this paper, term textbook will be defined as a bundle of curriculum artifacts, designed for use by teachers to deliver a course. It typically consists of * a edition of a book which is a traditional textbook designed to be used by students; * a teachers' guide (TG) which provides suggested instructional strategies in form of lesson plans explaining how to use student edition, black-line masters that can be photocopied and used with students, and assessment instruments (e.g., rubrics, tests, etc.); and * an accompanying website to provide information and/or links for students and teachers. Background: Use of Textbooks Dove (1998, p. 24) describes textbooks as the primary means of communicating information and instruction to students. A variety of studies--most of them done in USA--suggest that somewhere between 60% and 95% of classroom instruction and activity are textbook-driven (see Dove, 1998; Schug, et. al. 1997; Zahorik, 1991; Apple, 1991; Moulton, 1994; and others). Rozycki (2001) speculates that efficiency is primary appeal of textbooks--they provide content that would be too vast in scope for a teacher to gather on her own. Schug et al. (1997) found that US teachers surveyed reported primary motivations for using textbooks are: their usefulness in planning courses and lessons and value of ancillary materials (e.g., handouts, display materials) provided with textbooks. My experience suggests that textbooks are also appealing because, unlike other materials, they do not require daily photocopying. Approaches to Textbook Use Apple and Christian-Smith (1991) describe three ways to respond to, or interact with, texts: (1) dominated; (2) negotiated; and (3) oppositional. Though these three approaches are applicable to any text, for this paper I will consider them specifically as they relate to textbooks, which are indeed a form of text. In dominated approach, reader accepts message at face value. In a classroom context, this would involve positioning information in text as fact and not seeking alternate perspectives nor questioning content and its underlying assumptions. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".