What is content analysis?

In content analysis, you narrow down exactly what you’re going to teach vs. what you’re not going to teach.  This is important because most textbooks have grown over the years until they contain far more information than anyone could teach effectively in a given semester.  As a rule, it’s better for students to really learn a smaller set of critical material than to be exposed to a larger set of material that they fail to learn effectively.

In content analysis, you:

• decide which information is most critical.

• break it down into individual concepts

• consult taxonomies to decide what type of learning structures you’ll teach (for example, the most widely-used taxonomy is “Bloom’s Taxonomy”)