High School Science, Math Books Weak, Group Says

If today’s students want to understand how scientists mapped the human genetic code, they won’t get much help from their high school textbooks, a group of scientists and educators said recently.

“Textbooks treat the topic piecemeal, leaving out the simple story or obscuring it with needless details,” said George Nelson of the American Asn. for the Advancement of Science.

The group leveled its harshest criticism yet of U.S. math and science lessons, giving an unsatisfactory rating to all 10 of the major high school biology textbooks it reviewed.

They said the books--hundreds of pages long and filled with quizzes and splashy color drawings of cells--miss the big picture. They don’t flesh out the four basic ideas driving today’s research: how cells work, how matter and energy flow from one source to another, how plants and animals evolve, and the molecular basis of heredity.

Besides glossing over vital concepts to drill students on vocabulary words, the books fail to encourage students to examine their ideas or relate lessons to hands-on experiments and everyday life, researchers said.

Reacting to the report, publishers said state standards drive the content of biology lessons.

“The content of instructional materials is not determined by those who publish these materials but rather by those who use them,” said Stephen Driesler, executive director of the school division of the Assn. of American Publishers Inc.

Charts and more details can be found online at https://proj ect2061.aaas.org.