Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 3
This is the third part of a series of posts on how to choose a textbook for a course, from an article I wrote last spring: EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION© Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
Matching the Textbook to the Course
In the textbook adoption process, discriminate between first and secondtier undergraduate courses and graduate courses, and between courses conducted in lecture halls versus seminar rooms. If you teach a lecture course with many sections managed by graduate students, for example, you need as much standardization as a common textbook allows. If your course is introductory, a core textbook probably will be more useful to students than thoughtprovoking alternative texts. Save those for the secondtier course. In other words, your Introduction to Economics students are not ready for An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1776), beyond a quote or two, much as you would like to think you could make it accessible for them.
Commercial textbook publishers are careful to pitch textbooks to particular course levels and requirements, based on their research. These companies invest in national market research to learn how courses are taught and what is expected by way of content. The sales rep can show you an introduction to biology for non majors in biology, for example, and another introduction to biology for biology majors. You probably can order the textbook for the majors course with or without correlations to a lab manual supplement. The same company may have other introduction to biology textbooks for AP students and community college students in terminal degree programs. They probably also have an introduction to biology with a technology focus called introduction to the life sciences. In addition, nonsurvey introductory biology courses may selectively focus on cellular or molecular biology, for example, or on evolutionary biology.
So, what, exactly, is the expected scope and sequence of the course you are
teaching, and at what level are you teaching it?
Labels: course adoptions, evaluating textbooks, textbook adoption
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