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Retooled Textbooks Aim to Capture Common Core

Differences can be seen in the 5th grade reading series that publishers produced in response to the common core.

—Nicole Frugé/Education Week

Retooled basals rely more on documentation and analysis and less on personal experience

The two 5th grade volumes of McGraw-Hill's Treasures reading series at first glance look remarkably similar.

Both include, for instance, a nonfiction selection about a scientific mission to Antarctica, coupled with snippets from a researcher's journal. But there are subtle differences in what they ask students to think about as they read. The older edition, from 2008, merely asks them to explain the value of keeping a journal. The newer one, from 2011, asks the students to explain how "sensory details and other language" differ between a primary source, such as the journal, and a secondary source, such as the narrative.

In the 2013 version of its Reading Street series, Pearson officials have excised "reader response" questions and replaced them with prompts asking students to "use examples from the text...