SOCIAL STUDIES TEXTBOOK EVALUATION
Tracy Gouge and Heather McNeilly

        Through comparing our texts we realized that, although they were both second grade textbooks with supposedly the same competencies, the two had many differences.  The textbook, Meeting Many People had more useful skill pages included throughout the lessons, for example, “How to Use a Globe” and “How to Find Cause and Effect”, in comparison to People and Places.  Although there were differences in the textbooks, there were similarities as well.  Basically, both textbooks had overall structure to the book with an index, glossary, and table of contents. Through our comparisons, we felt that both the Harcourt Brace and Co. and Silver Burdett Ginn did a thorough job of including essential concepts for the course.

 
One of the major differences we found was in the organization of chapters/units/themes.  With People and Places the chapter topic is broken into subtopics, for instance, one chapter title is “Let’s Go by the Rules” and then listed under that are the subtopics Rules to Follow, Rules at Home, Rules in the Community and Rules at School.  In contrast, the text Meeting Many People has main lesson titles and unit titles like Living at Home and In The Neighborhood, yet there are no subtopics to break that information up for students.  Furthermore, these examples from the textbook show that the author in one develops on the idea or concept from the introduction but the other does not.  People and Places develop the concept of rules and keep that subject coherent throughout that lesson.  However, in Meeting Many People, the author skips from one concept to another in a single lesson without tying them together every time.
 
One feature of the textbooks that we felt were important was the use of illustrations.  Although this is not the foundation for deciding on a textbook, we believe the use of visual aids and illustrations is a way to attract or draw in many children to learning, at least at this age, more than a book full of words. In Meeting Many People, questions that provoked critical thinking in children were included at the end of each lesson like “When are you a consumer?”  This makes the children analyze parts of the lesson they studied.  Although the text People and Places had questions in the lessons, the ones in Meeting Many People were more thought provoking in our opinion.
 
  As we compared the two texts, we realized that Meeting Many People had more words that students may not know.  We also learned that Meeting Many People had more types of contextual clues than People and Places did.  We also noticed that the main idea in each of the books was explicit.  Each paragraph had the main idea stated in the beginning.  The majority of details were relevant to the development of the main idea in both of the texts.  The sentences in each of the texts were short and simple.  In each of the texts we noticed that with the majority of the visual aids, the author did not direct the reader to them.
 
  Through this analysis, we have decided that the textbook Meeting Many People would be our choice over People and Places.  Both were good and relevant textbooks; however, we feel that Meeting Many People would develop higher order thinking skills more than the other.