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Experts recommend reducing textbook coverage

History teachers appear hoist upon the horns of a conundrum. It would seem that they and their students need a chronological narrative such as textbooks provide, but textbooks are ill suited to the task. Is there no solution to this dilemma? For advice, let us consult some usually reliable sources.

The 1988 Bradley Commission Report on History in the Schools suggested "rethinking" textbooks: "The amount of time required to achieve student engagement and genuine comprehension of significant issues will necessitate leaving out much that is 'covered' by the usual text."17

The editors of Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History published in 2000, agreed "we need...serious relief from overwhelming textbook coverage."18

Even the 1997 report of the National Council for History Education, which strongly defended textbook use, proposed that the "endless store of facts, dates, events, ideas, and personalities" be reduced to an "essential core...Some must be chosen and most left out."19

These three groups of distinguished educators leave little doubt that the chronological narrative needs to be severely pruned to an essential core of knowledge in order to facilitate student understanding and to leave time in the curriculum for study of significant themes and issues.

The above excerpt is from "The Chronological Narrative," a discussion on this website. To read the full article, click here.

"There is mounting evidence that students in a variety of curricular domains, including science, mathematics, and social studies, are receiving fleeting exposure to a vast amount of material. The instructional medium most responsible for this state of affairs is the textbook...textbooks currently in use in the U.S. are unrivaled in size and amount of information covered...Unfortunately, many texts are so packed with facts, names, and details that the real point of the lesson is often obscured."

The above excerpt is from Frank N. Dempster's report on educational research in Phi Delta Kappan, "Exposing our students to less should help them learn more." To read the full article, click here.

Research from the National Research Council (NRC) suggests that learning transfer is facilitated when students focus on essential knowledge allowing the time necessary for new learning to be absorbed. The NRC report states, "Curricula that emphasize an excessively broad range of subjects run the risk of developing disconnected rather than connected knowledge...Attempts to cover too many topics too quickly may hinder learning and subsequent transfer because students learn only isolated sets of facts that are not organized and connected."28

The above excerpt is from "Learning and Thinking," a discussion on this website. To read the full article, click here.

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