Thinking Levels of Questions in Christian Reading Textbooks

If Christian schools desire students to achieve higher-level thinking, then the textbooks that teachers use should reflect such thinking. Using Risner's ( 1987 ) methodology, raters classified questions from two Christian publishers' fifth grade reading textbooks based on the revised Bloom's taxonomy (Anderson et al., 2001 ). The questions in the A Beka Book textbook contained 57.6% lower-level and 42.4% higher-level thinking; the questions in the Bob Jones University Press textbook contained 45.8% lower-level and 54.2% higher-level thinking. Analysis revealed a statistically significant difference between the percentages of thinking in the two publishers (p