QUESTIONS IN ELEMENTARY SCIENCE AND SOCIAL STUDIES TEXTBOOKS

A study examined how many and what kind of cuestions appear in elementary science and social studies textbooks and teachers ' manuals. Approximately 7500 questions from fourth and fifth grade science and social science textbooks from three major publishers were classified according to the following characteristics: (1) type of cognitive demand; (2) source of a.-.swer; (3) target relationship (the kind of information required, such as definition or cause and effect); (4) the form of the question; (5) purpose of the question; and (6) the number of words per question. Results indicated that almost half ci the instructional questions and two-thirds of the assessment questions are type 1 questions (involving little or no inference) and the next most frequent question is of type 2 (requiring some degree of inference). Type 3, 4, and 5 questions were relatively sparse in both content areas