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 Risner, G. P. (1987). Cognitive levels of questioning demonstrated by test items that accompany selected fifth-grade science textbooks (Doctoral dissertation). Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. [Google Scholar]) methodology, raters classified questions from two Christian publishers’ fifth grade reading textbooks based on the revised Bloom's taxonomy (Anderson et al., 2001 Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P. W., Cruikshank, K. A., Mayer, R. E., Pintrick, P. R., … Wittrock, M. C. (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. New York, NY: Addison Wesley Longman. [Google Scholar]). 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 < .05).