Textbook Evaluation method
Teachers are given the opportunity to instruct their students using various methods. The methods that teachers use can use will depend on several factors, such as what is needed for the curriculum and who the audience is. In order for teachers to be effective in their classrooms, it is important that practical and effective textbooks are available. This paper will discuss three methods that can be used to measure the reliability of a tenth grade history textbook. The methods that will be discussed in this paper are: the “Fry Reliability Formula”, the Cloze Procedure, and the Content Area Reading Inventory method (CARI).
Fry Reliability Formula According to Weitzel (2007), a gentleman named Edward Fry first developed a this method for teachers in order to determine the readability of materials used in classes. “The Fry readability method is a manual tool that determines the grade level of writing by analyzing three, 100-word passages from a selected writing, taking the average number of syllables and the average number of sentences for each passage and plotting those numbers on a Fry graph,”(Weitzel, 2007). Scripts of the textbook: World History Patterns of
Integration
Passage 1: “The Polynesian voyaging canoe one of the great ocean-going craft of the ancient world, was the means by which generations of adventurous voyagers were able to extend the human frontier far out into the Pacific, discovering a vast realm of Oceanic Islands. By 1000 B.C., when Mediterranean sailors were sailing in their land-locked sea, the immediate ancestors of the Polynesians had reached the previous uninhabited archipelagos of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Their descendants went on to settle all the habitable islands in a large triangular section bounded by the Hawaiian Archipelago” (Beck, 2005 p.s11).
Passage 2: “The Assyrians employed military force to control a vast empire. In contrast, the Persians based their empire on tolerance and diplomacy. They
Fry Reliability Formula According to Weitzel (2007), a gentleman named Edward Fry first developed a this method for teachers in order to determine the readability of materials used in classes. “The Fry readability method is a manual tool that determines the grade level of writing by analyzing three, 100-word passages from a selected writing, taking the average number of syllables and the average number of sentences for each passage and plotting those numbers on a Fry graph,”(Weitzel, 2007). Scripts of the textbook: World History Patterns of
Integration
Passage 1: “The Polynesian voyaging canoe one of the great ocean-going craft of the ancient world, was the means by which generations of adventurous voyagers were able to extend the human frontier far out into the Pacific, discovering a vast realm of Oceanic Islands. By 1000 B.C., when Mediterranean sailors were sailing in their land-locked sea, the immediate ancestors of the Polynesians had reached the previous uninhabited archipelagos of Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Their descendants went on to settle all the habitable islands in a large triangular section bounded by the Hawaiian Archipelago” (Beck, 2005 p.s11).
Passage 2: “The Assyrians employed military force to control a vast empire. In contrast, the Persians based their empire on tolerance and diplomacy. They