Middle and high school biology textbooks are filled with splashy pictures, arresting graphics and tons of ideas, but they fail to explain the big picture of how science affects students' lives, a national study has found.
"Few kids will learn much biology by using current textbooks on the market," said George Nelson, who leads Project 2061, a nationwide math, science and technology education reform project at American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
details," said Mr. Nelson, a former NASA astronaut and astronomy professor who joined the association in 1996.
None of the biology textbooks - all popular with school districts around the country - received high marks from two independent teams of biology educators who spent 100 hours per book, per each of four subject areas in making what they called "painstaking" evaluations. Those areas studied included cell structure and function, matter and energy transformation, molecular basis of heredity and natural selection and evolution.
High school textbooks scored slightly higher than those used in middle schools, although both had serious flaws in content and instructional design, the group's researchers said.
The fragmented approach to subject matter hurts children who have different learning styles and hinders teachers who "must compensate for the poor textbooks," despite limited resources and teaching time, said Jo Ellen Roseman, directory of the study.
"At their best, the textbooks are a collection of missed opportunities," Mrs. Roseman said.
While their accuracy is not suspect, the textbooks ignore important concepts in favor of technical terms and trivial details that are easy to test, she said. Illustrations often are complicated and "inadequately explained," and students, while given end-of-chapter activities to work on, receive little help in interpreting concepts they are supposed to grasp
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