Liberal/conservative bias in high school United States history textbooks

Includes bibliographical references (pages 113-127)This study was mainly concerned with the ability of\ud high school United States history textbooks to provide\ud balance between liberal and conservative viewpoints.\ud Discussion of ideological bias in textbooks has been\ud going on at least since the 1889 International Peace\ud Conference urged removal of prejudicial statements. Any\ud suggestion of one-sidedness is particularly exigent in\ud the case of U.S. history books because of implications\ud for the history-social studies profession's objective of\ud preparing students to deal effectively with the problems\ud of their increasingly pluralistic nation and\ud interdependent world. Preliminary data about domestic political, economic, and social issues from 1960 to 1984 were gathered from a sample of high school U.S. history books. Each message\ud unit underwent display analysis, which assigned it a\ud weighted value based on its type (paragraph, heading, or\ud graphic) and prominence in the text. Then each unit was\ud analyzed for direction of bias (favorable, unfavorable,\ud balanced/neutral) in order to calculate the Janis-Fadner\ud Coefficent of Imbalance. Bias consisted of two forms: (1) Overt, which\ud applied to material that was unbalanced with respect to\ud detailed definitions of liberalism and conservatism7 (2)\ud associative, which was developed to account for bias by\ud agenda and for cases where opinions about an ideology are\ud suggested by a topic that happens to be associated with\ud that ideology. It is reassuring, but not surprising, that overt\ud bias was almost non-existent in the representative\ud textbooks examined. Associative bias, in a liberal\ud direction was considerably more pronounced. The study\ud suggested some interesting explanations for these\ud results. It concluded that many texts could do more to\ud support history-social studies goals of teaching students\ud to make informed decisions based on objective analysis