CURRICULUM ANALYSIS

TEXTBOOK
Oceanography: An Invitation to Marine Science
Tom Garrison

6th Ed
The textbook used in this 10th and 11th grade class is a college level textbook. The text is used  a pacing guide for the teacher, but students rarely use it directly. At the beginning of each chapter there is a short story to get the reader engaged and to foreshadow the content. Sometimes they will read these short stories or  small passages as a close reading activity.Students look up their chapter vocabulary words in the textbook, which are  in bold.  The textbook beings with a "chapter glance" and gives a list of the main ideas and concepts.  Each section a full sentence heading in bold to convey information about the main concept  in that section.                   After every section, there are  
"concept checks" with questions and answers. Students answer some of these questions as part of close reading activities. However, students tend to copy the answers from the book and they cant explain the answers in their own words when asked to share. This is because they lack the academic language to create a connection between what they want to say and what the textbook is saying.

Book excerpt analyzed by Hemingway App

By using the Hemingway App, we can see that the textbook is deemed appropriate for grades 23 and up. The majority of students in this class read below an eight grade level. Therefore, they're not able to comprehend the aademic language used in the textbook.

The book contains illustrations, diagrams, real life pictures, and graphs on almost every page to support the text. Some of these visuals are incorporated in the students notes and PowerPoint presentations. 

NOTES
Most of the text used for this class comes from notes derived from the textbook. Notes an in a fill in the blank format. Students label diagrams that came from the book. The notes are simplified for the students by the teacher. The notes are divided in sections by main concepts and ideas. Students work on the note packets over the entire chapter. These are used as study guides because the tests are based on the notes.  Because there are so many blanks in the notes,  if students missed a day, it would be very difficult to fill in the notes on their own, even with help from the textbook. Another problem with the notes is that the diagrams and pictures are black and white which makes them unclear and difficult to see.