Approaching the standards? A review of new textbooks for the middle grades

Educators, in general, love to hate textbooks, often viewing them as encyclopedias that contain mountains of information. However, textbooks play an important role at this historic moment in the technology education movement, as concluded from a study that examined five new textbooks that were written for technology education in the middle grades since the release of Standards for Technological Literacy (STL). Here, Britton et al report part of a larger independent review of curricular resources for K-8 technology education, funded by the National Science Foundation.