Comparative Of The Primary School Social Studies Textbook Between China And The United States

Textbook is an important carrier of the contents of the curriculum, and it's also an important mean to achieve the goal of the curriculum. All countries attach their importance to the compilation, publication and use of the textbook.Our country has offered a social study curriculum and has compiled the relevance textbook right away since the early 20th century. With the age changes and society's transforming, we set the new request to the social study textbook. Social Studies in American school has experienced centuries of history, their social studies textbooks in primary schools has a long development process, and has accumulated a rich experience. Through examines the characteristics of the US "Social Studies" textbooks, and with the comparison of our textbooks, this research want to explore both the similarities and differences of these two textbooks and to find their common features and rules. We also can learn some experiences in textbook design through the comparison and provide some valuable references for the "Social Studies" curriculum as well as the textbooks overall design and rational distribution in China.This study is divided into six parts. The foreword discusses the background of the subject and defines the study issues involved rigorously. The second chapter makes a general overview of the history and the concept of curriculum, and analyse the different textbook systems between the two countries. In the third chapter, this research analyses and compares the structural design of the overall framework from three aspects: inductive module, content module and auxiliary module. The fourth chapter launches the analysis and comparison in view of the content of these two textbooks, and in this chapter, we take the grade as the dimension to explore the distribution characteristic of textbooks'contents. The fifth chapter is organized around presentation of two sets of textbooks, including the similarities and differences of overall layout, illustrations and language expression. Finally we make the conclusions of the research and put forward relevant recommendations for our social studies textbooks as follow: we should strengthen the cultivation of basic skills; columns should be clearly targeted in order to avoid duplication; we should pay attention to the social phenomenons and consider the depth of understanding; we should concern about the details design of icon symbols system; we should design more supporting teaching resources; we could expand the team who edited the textbook appropriately; we should draw lessons from the US textbook recycling system.