How Well Do Textbooks Support Students' Biology Learning? New Data from Project 2061

For some time, college biology faculty members have expressed concerns that their students were not prepared for college coursework. Biology topics, such as those that involve understanding changes in matter and energy, have been identified as being particularly problematic, even though most students in college science courses have completed high school courses in biology and chemistry. What are high school graduates expected to know about processes involving changes in matter and energy in living systems? What do their textbooks provide to support that learning? For the topic matter and energy transformations in living systems, AAAS Project 2061 has identified a coherent set of key ideas on the topic and analyzed biology textbooks and student understanding according to those ideas. We used the scores of a national sample of middle school students on test items designed to measure understanding of those ideas as an estimate of what students know before taking high school biology and chemistry courses and we used the scores of a sample of entering college students on those same test items as an estimate of what students know after taking those courses. Textbooks were analyzed for their inclusion of each of the key ideas and for the connections made between the ideas. The textbooks that were analyzed included those produced by commercial publishers for an introductory high school course and also those developed through National Science Foundation funding. Together, these books are those most likely to have been used by the entering college freshman. The presentation will describe methods and findings of the study and consider their implications for the development of textbooks and the preparation of teachers.