Inaccuracies Added to Growing List of Faults Found in Science Texts

Add inaccuracy to the multitude of sins critics are attributing to science texts these days.

Critics of science texts have lately accused publishers of “dumbing down” their books, of making them dull and of pandering to interest groups who oppose the teaching of evolution on religious grounds.

Above all, they charge, science texts with their predictable experiments and boring vocabulary lists are at least partly to blame for turning a fascinating subject into one students want to avoid.

Now it seems such texts may be guilty of botching elementary scientific facts, according to Bookwatch, a first-of-its-kind, no-holds-barred monthly newsletter devoted to reviewing junior high and high school science texts.

Launched in February

Bookwatch was launched in February by William V. Mayer, emeritus professor of biology of the University of Colorado, and William J. Bennetta, a research associate and fellow of the California Academy of Science.

Each issue offers three 1,000-word reviews by practicing scientists and science educators.

Bennetta said he first became interested in science texts in 1985 when California education authorities drew national attention by successfully demanding that publishers devote more space to evolution.

“For the first time I looked into the kinds of textbooks being submitted and was severely disappointed by what I saw,” he said.

The newsletter, published by the National Center for Science Education in Berkeley, claims to be to science texts what Consumer Reports is to retail products: a candid review free of influence from publishers. It is aimed at teachers and state officials responsible for selecting science texts.

The reviews in the four editions published so far identified an array of factual errors.

The teacher’s edition of “Life Science 1987,” a junior high biology text published by Scott, Foresman & Co., states incorrectly that the word biology comes from Latin roots meaning the study of life. As reviewer Michael T. Ghiselin pointed out, the word is rooted in Greek.

Error on Microscopes

Prentice-Hall’s “Biology 1987,” inaccurately tells 10th graders that electron microscopes were around in 1931--about 30 years before they were in use, according to reviewer Colin O. Hermans, professor of biology at Sonoma State University.

Lawrence W. Swan, a biology professor at San Francisco State University, found that the teacher’s edition of D. C. Heath & Co.’s “Life Science 1987” text for middle-school students was “loaded with errors.”

The text shows a picture of a lemur, but wrongly calls it a monkey. It presents a map incorrectly showing the range of the American opossum extending to northernmost Alaska. The map “also shows both monotremes and marsupials in New Zealand, though New Zealand has neither,” according to the review.

The authors of Scott, Foresman’s text, “Biology 1988,” “guess that . . . a fish has hipbones and a human-type pelvis” and “they depict the hazardous dumping of chemical wastes as something ‘in the past,’ ” write Mayer and Bennetta.

Bennetta said he has not heard from publishers so far but has gotten encouraging letters from education officials.

‘Great Deal of Respect’

But Kate Nyquist, vice president of science and health at Scott, Foresman, said that while she has “a great deal of respect” for the National Center for Science Education, “Bookwatch is one of their least productive enterprises.”

“I’m not saying we don’t make any mistakes and we’re always grateful to have them pointed out. But to say as the newsletter did that this book is ‘scientifically meaningless’ is rather global, and not correct.”

She said her company takes the newsletter “very seriously, but it criticizes from a very narrow perspective. It can hurt my business. But I don’t think our customers recognize it as a constructive evaluation tool.”

Calls to Prentice-Hall and D. C. Heath were not returned.