Do Textbooks Dictate the Content of Mathematics Instruction in Elementary Schools?

Abstract

The purposes of this investigation were to (a) describe teachers’ styles of textbook use and (b) examine the overlap between content taught and textbook content in elementary school mathematics. Using daily teacher logs and a three-dimensional classification system as guides, trained raters generated detailed classifications of all problems presented in books and all content presented to students over the course of an entire school year. The results of analyses of overlap between textbook content and content taught challenge the popular notion that elementary school teachers’ content decisions are dictated by the mathematics textbooks they use In each classroom studied, there were important differences between the curriculum of the text and teachers’ topic selection, content emphasis, and sequence of instruction.