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Findings and Recommendations of Instructional Materials Committee

Explore how excessive length in U.S. math textbooks impacts learning, costs, and coherence, and find recommendations for improvement.

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Findings and Recommendations of Instructional Materials Committee

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  1. Findings and Recommendations of Instructional Materials Committee

  2. I. U.S. mathematics textbooks are extremely long • Even elementary school textbooks sometimes exceed 700 pages • Middle and high school textbooks typically 600-900 pages • Often exceed 1,000 pages with study guides and answers

  3. II. Extreme length not necessary for effective instruction • Far shorter textbooks (e.g., 250 pages) in countries with much higher math achievement • U.S. math textbooks used to be much shorter • Extreme length both reflects and contributes to mile wide inch deep curriculum

  4. III. Reasons for extreme length • Varying state standards lead publishers to include in national edition all topics covered by any state in that grade • State-specific textbooks in Texas, Florida, and California are 200-250 pages shorter • Photos, anecdotes, applications with little math content add to length

  5. IV. Costs of extreme length • Wasted money • Wasted paper and energy • Back strain and refusal to lug books home to do homework (?)

  6. IV. Costs of extreme length, cont’d. • Reduced coherence of presentation (!) • Almost impossible to build coherent argument from one chapter to next if cannot anticipate order in which students read chapters • Increases students’ difficulty in understanding high level organization of course

  7. V. Recommendations • More efforts by publishers to produce state or region specific editions • Adoption of common standards by multiple states to make “region specific” editions feasible • Reduction of material not essential to math learning

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