Impact of the design of U.S. history textbooks on content acquisition and academic engagement of special education students: an experimental investigation

We used randomized controlled trials to compare the impact of the designs of 2 United States history textbooks on the content acquisition and behavior of 8th-grade students identified for special education services or identified as low achieving. We also investigated whether teachers differed in their use of instructional activities and questioning strategies based on the type of text used. Our findings suggest that students learned more history content, were more actively engaged, and answered more questions correctly when using the experimental textbook. Teachers used different activities depending on which textbook they used, but did not differ in types of questions asked.