Differences Between a Standards-Based Curriculum and Traditional Textbooks in High School Earth Science

This study investigates differences between a curriculum based on the National Science Education Standards and curricula following two traditional textbooks. Earth System Science in the Community (EarthComm) and the “most used” high school earth science textbooks in the United States and Korea were analysed in terms of general features, questioning style, and level of laboratory activities by two experts using Textbook Questioning Strategies Assessment Instrument and Herron's four levels of activities. The inter-rater reliability varied from 0.91 to 0.97 for questioning style depending on each individual book and 0.99 for laboratory activities. The results showed that the standards-based curriculum EarthComm included the largest number of pages and laboratory activities with the least number of chapters and concepts among the three textbooks compared. The standards-based curriculum included by far more questions and the largest percentage of experiential questions compared to both of the most-used traditional textbooks. Non-experiential questions tend to be “open-ended” in standards-based curriculum, “direct information” in the Korean textbook, and both “open-ended” and “direct information” in the most used U.S. textbook. Higher-order questions are featured in standards-based curriculum, which call for inferences and application. These findings explicitly stress that high school earth science textbooks should be inquiry-oriented in teaching and learning. The study further discusses its meanings and implications for student learning in earth science.