Textbook Authorship

Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 6

This is the sixth 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. This post includes a discussion of criteria for selection, beginning with four key tests: the index, the table of contents, the sources, and the dates. © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.

The Index and Outline Tests
As a college instructor I often chose textbooks indignantly and by default after subjecting them to the “index test.” This is where you quickly check the index for a half dozen theorists and researchers or terms and concepts that are dear to your heart. If those particular names, words, or phrases are not there, then the textbook is unacceptably flawed. Off with its head!

This is quick, but hardly scientific. For one thing, indexes are notoriously flawed. Publishers or their packagers (i.e., production houses) outsource indexing to lowest bidders, who may not have professional experience with college­level textbooks in your field. From the other side of the desk, I have often fumed over the inadequate indexes appended to textbooks I helped to develop. Whatever you are looking for, in other words, very likely is in the book, if not in the index. If this is really an overriding concern for you, request access to an electronic version of the textbook from the publisher and conduct “Find” searches for the terms you require your textbook to contain.

Tables of contents (TOCs) also may mislead, though they certainly sketch the parameters. The main reason is that it is standard practice to include in a TOC only the A­ and B­heads (that is, the first and second levels of heading), omitting the details given in C­ and D­heads. (The purpose is to contain the length of the front matter.) Depending on the construction of text headings, therefore, a lot of information may be missing from the TOC. Nevertheless, publishers go to great lengths to craft the TOC, because it is the most visible and most common basis for decisions to adopt.

Chapter sequence also probably should not matter much. I once rejected a textbook because the sequence of chapters did not match the way I taught the course. Most of us know by now, however, that assigning chapters out of sequence usually is not a problem. In fact, the trend toward delivering textbooks electronically has led to ever­greater modularization. The exception to the “ease of resequencing” principle is a textbook with functionally interrelated chapters—a rare find that may even be reason enough for changing the way you teach the course. Some of the best upper­level or second­tier textbooks begin as functionally integrated narratives that an editor then chops up with headings to give them a textbook, rather than a trade book, format.

The Citations and Currency Tests
My second test for textbooks has always been the references. After ascertaining that most everyone is cited who should be, I conduct what I call my “currency test.” This consists of running my finger down the dates of publication in the References section to count informally the numbers of works cited for the current and preceding years. I used to reject any textbook that did not have two or three current cites per chapter. For example, in 2006, a textbook with no citations after 2004 was hopelessly outdated, or so I thought. Now I know that by the time students buy them in the college store, textbooks necessarily are about two years out of date, although with electronic publishing this gap is narrowing.

How can this be? Well, textbooks are 1 to 3 years in development, when the manuscript is drafted, reviewed, and revised (and rerevised); 6 to 9 months in production (down from a year), when the manuscript is copyedited and indexed and the book is designed and laid out; and another 3 to 6 months in manufacturing and fulfillment, when the book is printed, bound, warehoused, and shipped. Then, the textbooks must be available for you and other prospective adopters to sample early enough so you can order them for your future course (usually a full semester before your course is scheduled to begin), and early enough for your bookstore to obtain and shelve the books for your students to buy before your course starts.

You can imagine, then, how textbooks appear out of date. A text with a 2008 copyright date that you sample and order in 2007 may have only a scattering of 2006 cites as its most current references. As a developmental editor, knowing how important currency is to instructors, I got a lot of pleasure out of infusing it into a book during the production phase. (For this, one needs to cultivate the friendship of production editors, because content is not supposed to be changed during production.) If I could swing it, my updates included one ultra­current source citation per chapter and a few “ripped from the headlines” examples or cases, nimbly substituted into captions, chapter opening vignettes, or chapter closers (with the author’s knowledge, of course). I was exceptional in this,
however, so as a rule don’t let your currency test be the deciding factor.

An exception is grandfathered references, which can weigh heavy cumulatively. I reject textbooks in any subject with a preponderance of references that are more than ten years out of date. Even in fields that rely on archaic texts, historic documents, or foundational research, current interpretations and critical studies of those materials must be current and cutting edge or otherwise reflect contemporary syntheses. No subject is safe from the need to be current in this sense.

Labels: choosing a textbook, Criteria for textbook selection, evaluating textbooks, textbook adoption

posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 2:26 PM