GENERAL PAPERS 135 
THE CONTENT OF A GENERAL SCIENCE COURSE 
J. F. Groves, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING 
As a result of a more or less general dissatisfaction in first 
year high school science courses, a number of enterprising 
science teachers have developed first year courses in general 
science for their classes. The marked success of these courses 
and a growing demand for text books on the subject have in- 
duced several of the members to reduce their material to book 
form, ‘The result is that we now have several texts on this 
subject which, to the uninitiated, present quite a diversity in 
content and arrangement. Since the available material for 
such a course is so extensive, the question of selection is some- 
what embarrassing. The way in which these different authors 
have answered this question presents an interesting situation. 
In order to show how this has been done, we have attempted 
to make a comparative analysis of a number of these texts as 
shown in the accompanying diagram. We predict that such 
an analysis will be strongly resented by the authors of these 
texts. They undoubtedly will claim that they have attempted 
to embody the explanation of the most common phenomena 
of the child’s environment without regard to any particular 
science to which these phenomena belong. We must confess 
that considerable difficulty has been encountered in trying to 
make the data conform to such analysis. Certain topics often 
involve the presentation of a phenomenon from one field and 
an explanation of the underlying principle from another field. 
A comparison of the total number of pages devoted to the 
various subjects by these authors indicates in a mechanical 
way the average emphasis given to the different subjects. 
Undue emphasis should not be given, however, to such totals 
without keeping in mind several important facts. 
First, reference to the table indicates that approximately 
one-half of some of the texts are devoted to material usually 
presented in one of the special sciences. Nevertheless, many 
schools claim that their course in general science is not based 
on or organized around any special science. It will be noted 
also that some of the large totals are not due to special em- 
phasis by all of the texts, but to a predominating emphasis by 
one or more texts. 
