Connecting Textbook Use to Student Achievement

It has become an accepted fact that teachers in the United States (Banilower et al., 2013) and other countries (e.g., Hiebert et al., 2003) frequently use textbooks in their teaching practices. Despite the prevalence of textbooks in mathematics classrooms, it is anything but straightforward to connect the textbooks used in classrooms to student achievement.

For instance, two teachers may choose different activities from the same textbook, may skip different sections and may even teach the same activity in very different ways so that students' opportunities to learn the mathematical ideas appearing in the two textbooks are very different. Nonetheless, a federally funded study, Comparing Options in Secondary Mathematics: Investigating Curriculum (COSMIC) has recently published two articles, which enable us to draw some conclusions about the effect of textbooks and other factors on student achievement. This article summarizes two separate studies conducted by this research group involving students enrolled in the first year of high school (Grouws et al., 2013) and in the second year of high school (Tarr, Grouws, Chavez, & Soria, 2013).