Programa Nacional do Livro Didático (PNLD) aims to universalize the textbooks and to evaluate these materials based on official documents. In biology for high school official documents advise that contents should be guided by ecological and evolutionary explanations in an interdisciplinary method and that evolution should work as a central theme. Based on Bardin's Content Analysis and Mayr's Conceptual Framework of Biology the contents concerning the phylum Chordata were examined in three textbook collections approved by PNLD. The aim was to evaluate how textbooks approved for student's use discuss evolution. This study showed that textbooks utilize evolution superficially and sparsely. The most common use is in descriptions with addition of evolutionary concepts or terms that refer to evolution.
Evolution; Content Analysis; Textbooks.
