Textbooks determine the thinking and direction of education in developing democratic countries. In Taiwan, especially, since the implementation of the grades 1-9 curriculum reforms, the textbook opening-up policy has become a key issue that must be squarely faced as curriculum reforms are carried out. Following implementation, however, the pragmatic advancement of textbook approval policies, including a parallel system which includes both textbooks compiled by government and private organizations, should be allowed to serve as a fine-tuning mechanism employed by the Ministry of Education (MOE) to mitigate the impact of the textbook opening-up policy.
　　Building on earlier studies, this paper collected reports published between 2002 and 2008 reflecting opinions on this subject, including a number of articles with different slants taken from the China Times, the United Daily News, the Liberty Times, Legislative Yuan communiqués, and official MOE documents to understand trends in the development of textbooks for primary and secondary schools in order to evaluate and carefully consider these trends and further to propose suggestions regarding the role the government should play in the nation’s textbook market to guarantee textbook quality, from curriculum planning, textbook editing, trial use, and selection to evaluation and feedback, to facilitate the establishment of a sound mechanism and an agency tasked with the study and development of curriculum to perform long-term, systematic research and development on teaching materials to serve as grounded research to lay a foundation for the successful reformation of curriculum and textbooks.

　　Textbooks are able to shape the attitude of students. The descriptions of people with disabilities in textbooks would influence students’ attitude to people with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to analyze people with disabilities described in Chinese-language elementary school textbooks, including the prevalence of categories of disabilities, the development of their character, significant others and inclusive education. The results of study include: (1) People with disabilities are significantly underrepresented in Chinese-language elementary school textbooks. The most prevalent disabilities found in textbooks focused on physical disabilities in nature. Four categories of disabilities neglected in textbooks including hearing impairment, autism, emotional disabilities, and developmental retardation. (2) Textbooks tended to emphasize the character development of well-known people with disabilities. (3) Significant others for people with disabilities including parents, teachers, and their peers. (4) Only two compositions regarding to inclusive education in textbooks. The themes focused on the participation of physically and mentally disabled students in class activities and experiencing disabilities.

　　The objectives of this study were to investigate junior high school science and technology (S&T) teachers’ satisfaction levels in regard to the framework and content of volume one of the national S&T textbook for junior high school students and to examine differences based on demographic variables of the teachers. To achieve these objectives, a questionnaire with 184 items was mailed to all 56 junior high schools that selected the national S&T textbook. The following conclusions were made based on the survey results: (1) The gender, major, teaching experience, and educational background of teachers did not affect their satisfaction with the national textbook; (2) Teachers were moderately satisfied with the “framework,” “content attributes,” “teaching attributes” and “readability” of the national textbook; (3) Teachers tended to be more satisfied with the “physical attributes” of the national textbook; (4) The framework of the national textbook needs to better planned to provide more appropriate learning content and order; (5) The content of the national textbook could be improved by enhancing the integration of rationale, and the completeness, logicality, and relation to life of content; (6) The national textbook could be improved by planning instructional goals, learning activities, evaluations, and auxiliary learning materials; (7) The content of the national textbook could be improved with more appropriate illustrations, characters, fonts, interesting headings, and appropriate sentence structure.

　　This article analyzes the complexity of transforming the curriculum ideals embodied in reform initiatives into syllabus documents, with a particular focus on the call for developing generic skills, values and attitudes. The central argument is that the transformation is fundamentally a conceptual endeavor requiring serious curriculum work which has to deal with issues concerning content selection, organization and framing. It entails a need to rethink and re-conceptualize curriculum content in view of curriculum ideals. Implications are discussed concerning the challenges of curriculum transformation in the current emergent curricular landscape in Singapore.