Methodological Choices in the Content Analysis of Textbooks for Measuring Alignment With Standards

With the recent adoption of the Common Core standards in many states, there is a need for quality information about textbook alignment to standards. While there are many existing content analysis procedures, these generally have little, if any, validity or reliability evidence. One exception is the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC), which has been widely used to analyze the alignment among standards, assessments, and teachers' instruction. However, the SEC can be time-consuming and expensive when used for this purpose. This study extends the SEC to the analysis of entire mathematics textbooks and investigates whether the results of SEC alignment analyses are affected if the content analysis procedure is simplified. The results indicate that analyzing only every fifth item produces nearly identical alignment results with no effect on the reliability of content analyses.