Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 8
This is the 8th in a series of blog entries from an article I wrote last spring: EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION. This post considers in depth length and price issues in choosing a textbook. © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
Length and Price Issues
The number of pages in a textbook is a consideration in textbook adoption if you expect students to finish reading it by the end of the course. Most undergraduate introductory textbooks are developed to be doable in 14 weeks, leaving 2 weeks for testing and other things in a standard semester. You’ll notice that these textbooks usually have 14 to 16 chapters. In this model, students master content at a rate of a chapter a week. Textbooks designed for shorter terms—8week and 12week courses—typically have fewer chapters. Highlevel textbooks and those in the sciences tend to have more chapters but often of shorter length. The industry standard for maximum chapter length is 40 book pages inclusive.
The number of pages in a book and the number of colors affect pricing. Most introductory undergraduate textbooks are under 640 pages in length (20 signatures) and are printed in 4 colors. Page counts of 576 or 608 are more common. The lower the page count, the lower the level generally, although concise editions may prove exceptional, and science textbooks at all levels tend to be longer. Secondtier textbooks for courses with comparatively high enrollments often are twocolor, and highlevel and bargain editions typically are onecolor (black on white) and largely unillustrated.
The big 4color textbooks are expensive, and the media are full of running complaints about financial (as well as physical) burdens on students with the highpriced tomes they are forced to buy and carry about. Since 2004, Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) and congressional and court actions have forced publishers to debundle textbooks from supplements and to provide alternate formats for textbooks to which students can have access. Most publishers now offer etext or web versions, for example, and shrinkwrapped threehole punched chapters for coverless delivery. Institutions also may license textbooks to deliver to students electronically at lower cost via Intranet, Blackboard/WebCT, or other means. Students buy secondhand editions in online retail and consignment shops and may even rent downloads of textbooks chapter-by-chapter to read on their laptops or hand-held computers. Thus, price alone should not guide your selection of textbook for your course.
Some instructors feel righteous rejecting print textbooks on the basis of price. Yes, they are too expensive. But it is a mistake to place the blame exclusively on the corporate greed of evil demon publishers. For example, frequent price-boosting revisions are not necessarily “fraudulent.” Revising a textbook an average of every 3.5 years (as statistics show is the case) is responsible in light of the rate of change in knowledge and scholarship in today’s world. It is not a ploy to suck more profit out of the kids. Besides, it is you who demands currency in your textbooks. It is you who adopts a more current textbook over one that came out a year or two earlier. What publisher will come to you and say, give us your business! Our book is out of date but it’s cheaper. Would you really adopt that book? Publishers must revise often just to stay competitive enough to remain in business.
Why is each new edition usually more expensive than the last? Because of the same kinds of market forces that cause you to pay a higher price for a pound of meat this month than you did last month. Because the price of a stamp went up. Because the cost of a barrel of oil went up, and the cost of a kilowatt hour. Because professional textbook development easily costs 12 to 15k. Because a single photo can cost $500 to use and a copyeditor can command $4 per manuscript page. Because the health insurance for warehouse workers went up. Because the college bookstore chains adds a big markup. Because booksellers return unsold books at the publisher’s expense. Because publishers cannot legally write off unsold inventory. Because in publishing profit margins rarely rise above 10 percent regardless. Because people sell pirated copies. And because you and your students keep selling your textbooks back to the used book merchants, reducing the revenues not only from the publishers but also from the authors who wrote them. The authors lose their royalties. Try adding up the cost of all the used textbooks for your course that are available online, and you’ll see what I mean.
No, of course publishers are not innocent victims. But they are businesses, and there are many hidden costs beyond their control. The problem is more complex with more widely shared accountability than we have thus far admitted. Fortunately, CDROMs, DVDs, the Internet, and iPod technologies are enabling publishers to lower prices without becoming unprofitable. To professors who claim that everyone should have free access to textbooks and the knowledge they contain, I say, explain to us, then, how the people who research, write, edit, produce, design, illustrate, manufacture, market, sell, store, and ship those textbooks are supposed to earn their living, buy their groceries, pay their rent, and finance their children's education.
As my (educated) daughter would say, it is what is it. If price is a highpriority factor in your textbook adoptions, please just check all the delivery options a publisher offers before axing an otherwise suitable candidate.
Labels: choosing a textbook, evaluating textbooks, Textbook pricing
Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 7
This is the seventh 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 continues a discussion of criteria for selection with observations on the famous "thumb test." © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
The Thumb Test
Marketing managers in higher education publishing often refer to the “thumb test,” a textbook selection technique even more quick and dirty than the “index text” and the “currency test.” In a thumb test you hold the book’s spine in your left hand and ruffle the pages from the front to the back of the book between thumb and forefinger of your right hand, as if flipping the cels in a homemade animation. Your eye catches the design and format, including fonts, number of columns of text, color palette, design motifs, part or chapter openers, photos and art, tables, captions, type and frequency of headings, and boxes. Out of this visual blur your mind builds an impression: This is (or is not) the textbook for you!
I’ve often been astonished to read professors’ prejudices regarding book design and format, as if they knew anything about book building or were expert in programs such as PageMaker, InDesign, or QuarkXPress, and as if they even understood how font sets work or the role of PMS colors in a book’s palette. I don’t think much of those who choose textbooks on the basis of appearance alone; e.g., you don’t like pink, or you don’t like orange, or you don’t like boxes, or the margins are too crowded, or the pictures are too large (or too small).
That goes for judging a book by its cover too. Publishers expend great sums on cover designs, having learned that professors, not just the masses, will adopt or not adopt on that basis alone. That Introduction to Criminal Justice textbook, for example. Should the cover be art or photos? One photo or a montage? Should the American flag appear somewhere on the cover? Or the American colors? If there are police officers, should they be literal or abstract or iconic? Should care be taken to include female and minority officers? Should they appear armed? What
about the border patrol and tribal police? If police officers are shown, will it appear to skew the survey course in favor of law enforcement over the courts and corrections? Or should the cover show a courthouse (all those nice pillars) or a prison (all those nice bars) instead? Or all three? Or maybe just a symbol of justice—the statue of the lady with her blindfold and scales? Is there one where her breasts are not too revealed or suggestive? Or is the statue idea too trite or too focused on law per se. Would a statue look too highlevel? Is there something we could have on the cover instead that would suggest terrorism or Homeland Security? And so on ad nauseam. Book designers and all those who work with them strive for beautiful books, and often succeed, but we nevertheless must refrain, I think, from selecting textbooks solely on that basis.
Format is an exceptionfor example, the delivery of content as a book or an e book and, if a book, the type of binding and trim size. Your course may beg for a hardcover textbook with a sewn binding, a perfectbound paperback, or a spiralbound layflat flipbook. The 7 X 10, 8 X 10, and 8.5 X 11 trim sizes are fairly standard for undergraduate textbooks. The larger the trim size the lower the level, as a rule, although there are exceptions. Smaller trim sizes, especially the 6 X 9, are more typical of trade booktype texts such as may be assigned in higherlevel courses.
Labels: choosing a textbook, Criteria for textbook selection, evaluating textbooks, thumb test
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
Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 5
This is the fifth 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 myths about textbooks publishing, especially the issue of revisions. © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
Myths and Urban Legends about Textbooks
Contrary to popular misconception, textbooks are not all clones, although by necessity they must be similar to reflect course syllabi. Publishers go to great lengths and expense to ensure that their products are unique while remaining mainstream and competitive. “Mainstream” means following the conventional scope and sequence of the course as it is typically taught on the nation’s campuses, based on market research. “Competitive” means that it has all the bells and whistles that make other companies’ textbooks successful (i.e., profitable). And “unique” means that it has its own valueadded twist or enough novel material to pique customer interest and capture market share. Editors fill whole binders with comparison grids to chart how their book is mainstream, competitive, and unique in relation to other books for the same course from other publishers in their league.
The downside of this is that major publishers do not take risks of any magnitude with textbook content and organization. If you have a radically different approach to your subject or want to teach it in a new way that is not currently accepted practice, you likely will not find a textbook that suits your needs. In fact this is a prime reason for not using a textbook. Assuming that your institution, department, and students explicitly know about and want what you are offering, you will need to find or develop your own course materials or persuade a publisher to consider your own proposal for a new textbook. To do this you would need to present some proof that there really is a new or emerging market or clear demand for this kind of textbook. I have seen this done successfully—for
example, with the world’s first introductory textbooks in field of applied anthropology. However, I have also seen such efforts fail—for example, when the world simply is not ready for your take on the “emerging critical consensus” or “new synthesis” that you have in mind.
Another urban legend is that revisions are merely cosmetic. Actually, the investment needed to bring out a revision is only slightly less than for a first edition, which can be as much as a quarter of a million dollars for an introductory textbook in a core subject. Much more is involved, therefore, than slapping on new covers. The authors’ contracts must be renegotiated, new authors may be brought into the team and others retired, editors apply new market research and competition analyses to develop a revision plan, and usually the book is at least
partly redesigned. The degree of similarity in appearance between a revision and its previous edition depends almost exclusively on market considerations. Do people love this book and remain loyal to it? Then make it look much the same. Are people dissatisfied with it or iffy? Or is there simultaneously a major new challenge from a competitor? Then make it look different.
Industry standards dictate that a revised edition of a textbook should be approximately onethird changed from the previous edition or substantively different in some other way. This extends to replacing a third or more of the
photos and figures. The real reasons for revising are to correct, update, improve, or adapt a work. At one point, psychology textbooks that did not discuss DSMIV were judged obsolete, for example, and had to be revised. Teacher education texts had to be revised after enactment of the NCLB. Most publishers made rapid and costly revisions in selected titles after 9/11. I have worked on textbooks that were revised within two years because customers objected to certain content or certain content was found to be outdated or wrong, but also because the authors were suing each other over royalty splits. While some of these changes did not add up to a third of the book, they necessitated a revision.
While it is easy to think (and not unheard of) that publishers put out new editions as often as they can get away with in order to reap more profits, this usually is not the case. For one thing, textbooks, especially first editions, normally need at least two years of sales just to pay for themselves, much less pay the authors their royalties and the publisher its margin. For another, the market readily punishes publishers (justly or not) who put an older edition out of print by bringing out a new higherpriced edition after only a year. While this may look like corporate greed, however, it’s usually just a desperate effort to save a book with insufficient sales that otherwise would be taken off the market entirely. Such a book might even be revised heavily enough (half changed) to be brought out as a new first edition. Older textbooks often are recycled in this way, through mix and match
cannibalizations. I call them “frankensteins,” and like the original, they’re not inherently bad, (though I have seen some that are badly done).
Unless it is in a series designed as annual editions, therefore, a book that is revised after one year is in trouble. Maybe it had something in it (or not in it) that was killing sales. Maybe it was late coming out and missed its sales for the first semester of its copyright year (in which case a revision can justify permitting it to continue to exist at all). In any event, the publisher is risking double shortfalls by bringing out a revision before the previous edition has paid for the cost of publishing it. In light of these facts we may wish to reexamine our prejudices and assumptions regarding textbook revisions.
There no doubt are other myths and urban legends about textbook publishing (I would love to hear about them from readers). Now, however, we come to the arcane matters of how a textbook is built and how its scope and sequence are realized and how these factors might affect your decision making process for textbook adoption.
Labels: choosing a textbook, course adoptions, evaluating textbooks, textbook publishing, textbook revisions
Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 4
This is the fourth 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 readability and difficulty level.
© Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
Matching the Textbook to the Students
Another key question to ask is, why are students taking this course? The answer should help guide your textbook selection. After all, the course is for them, right? If they are taking it because of what Rate My Professor says about you, then go ahead and be quirky in your choice of textbooks. But perhaps you are unlucky enough to be teaching one of those hated required prerequisite courses in which students otherwise would not enroll. The textbook, then, should provide them with the standard foundational information that your department deems necessary for further study of the subject. Are they community college students seeking undergraduate degrees or transfer to fouryear schools? Then the textbook should help to qualify them. Are students taking the course to prepare for practice? Then choose a textbook that focuses on theory into practice, mechanics, or application. Or is your course likely the last one they will ever take in your subject? Then, (for pity’s sake), give them the gist, the bare bones, the bottom line, and go for flashes of insight. Here is the best venue, for example, for a brief or concise version of a standard textbook. Or maybe one of those new magazinestyle textbooks modeled on imagebased learning.
Students usually are not who we think they are or might wish them to be. A classic error of college instructors is to err on the side of either optimism or pessimism. The optimist sees eager young minds full of misinformation or
ignorance, yearning for enlightenment and/or for the intellectual tools that will enable them to be happy and/or rich. This instructor is prone to choosing textbooks that expect too much of naive readers. The pessimist, on the other hand, sees skeptical young minds full of ennui. They need to be shown a thing or two, but they don’t care about enlightenment, can’t read or write, don’t want to have to work for knowledge, and expect good grades. This instructor often favors unchallenging or boring textbooks that expect little, which actively reinforces students’ natural disgust over hypocrisies, wherever found. That said, realistic assessment of students’ abilities (or zone of proximal development) is essential to proper textbook selection, bringing me to the question of “level.”
Difficulty Level and Readability
Matching textbooks to students involves understanding where they are at intellectually and in terms of basic literacy skills. “Difficulty” in this context refers to degree of intellectual rigor; that is, it has to do with the complexity and coherence of thought in a narrative. A “difficult” text is one that leaves out parts of the process of thought, assuming (rightly or wrongly) that the reader can easily supply the missing parts. However, leaps of logic, inference, source citation, faith, and irony are all guaranteed to leave novices in the dust. Thus, you should not
choose a textbook without first reading samples of the narrative to test for difficulty, with as much empathy for the real student reader as you can muster.
Note, however, that a difficult text may be eminently readable, as difficulty and readability are not the same. Readability is a measure simply of word order, word length, sentence length, sentence complexity, and similar features of paragraphs. Some of the most difficult texts on record are deceptively easy reads. Several formulae of varying usefulness exist for testing readability. I like the modified Fry for postsecondary instructional materials, but I always confirm my assessment using two or three methods. A keyword search on “readability” will lead you to several appropriate methods for analyzing readability.
The point of making sure that students can both read and comprehend your chosen textbook is simply to avoid impeding their acquisition of course content unnecessarily. I don’t agree with the tough love types who feel that students should have to struggle for meaning. There is more than enough struggle to go around as it is. Facilitating their reading for rapid comprehension while also stretching their flexibility and range of thought seems the best mix for a textbook. Find the students where they are.
Commercial textbook publishers subject manuscripts to readability analyses, which sometimes serve as the point of purchase. As a rule of thumb, for undergraduate textbooks they aim for grade 12, on the unassailable logic that the college undergraduate is a high school graduate. Being labeled in the trade as “too high level” or “too low level” can be the kiss of death for a textbook. “Too high level” translates as “for majors only” or “for graduate students,” which publishers may see as too small as markets to invest in. Educational publishers, like trade book and mass market publishers, need blockbusters—the highest possible volume of sales to the broadest possible market segment. At the same time, “too low level” often translates as “dumbed down”—pretty risky nowadays in the politics of textbook publishing, despite the unquestionable success of Wiley’s “For Dummies” model.
Certain characteristics give away highlevel and lowlevel texts, and your choice of a textbook for your course may properly lie somewhere between them. The hallmarks of highlevel texts include sophisticated designs with double or triple columned text; footnotes or chapter endnotes; extensive parenthetical source citations; a bibliography in addition to a reference section in the book end matter; and long separate author and subject indexes. Sometimes the only chapter closing pedagogy is a selected or annotated bibliography. Narrative text may be comparatively uninterrupted by headings or may have 4 or 5 levels of heading, or may even have doublenumbered paragraphs. Boxes tend to be few, unillustrated, long, and thinly linked to the narrative. Photos are fewer in number and printed smaller. Higherlevel texts tend to have nonpedagogical (purely descriptive) captions, if any, and to ask fewer questions of readers generally. Figures and tables may even appear without titles. Material is presented authoritatively with little effort to interact with learners, and there may be no student supplements other than a lab manual.
Lowlevel texts, in contrast, are distinguished by fewer references applied more broadly, such that parenthetical source citations may not even appear within the body of the narrative. In terms of design, lowerlevel texts typically have one column of text with comparatively wide margins, often containing extensive pedagogical marginalia, including definitions of key terms and tieins with print and electronic student supplements. The text may be broken up fairly frequently with dramaticlooking nested headings, but usually only two or three levels of heading are used. Interim reviews may follow each section of text, and extensive review and application sections may appear after each chapter or part. More pages may contain more images, art, boxes, and white space than text or applications, and photos may be printed large and carry pedagogical captions. Boxes typically are more integrated within narrative context. The book end matter may have a Glossary, and the author and subject indexes usually are combined.
Adaptations of textbooks, such as shortened versions, usually are published as new editions rather than as revisions. A common misconception is that brief or concise editions are dumbed down versions of the parent text. Usually this is not the case, however. Anyone who has written an abstract knows that the abstract is not an inferior version of the article or research it describes. A brief edition is supposed to work the same way. Like an abstract, it omits only whatever details, examples, illustrations, or data are not needed for basic comprehension. Like an abstract, it focuses on premises or theoretical stances, key questions or hypotheses, basic methods, and important findings or conclusions. Thus, concise editions can be as highlevel or as lowlevel as their parent texts without
inconsistency and without dumbing down.
Intentionally dumbeddown texts do exist, however. The following features in combination give them away: lowlevel language; lack of appropriate technical vocabulary, overexplanation; overuse of personal/downhome anecdotes or homilies; oversimplified or hypothetical examples; use of repetitions and refrains as in storytelling; use of statements that go without saying; analogies relating to the reader’s childhood or adolescent experience; use of images and applications in place of narrative text; and overdesign. Authors are as much to blame for dumbing down as editors or publishers. Ultimately, the true source of dumbing down is the customers—the instructors who complain about the inadequacies of their students, the students who complain about the inaccessibility of their textbooks.
Labels: choosing a textbook, difficulty level, dumbing down, evaluating textbooks, Readability, textbook adoption
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
Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 2
This is the second 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 You to the Textbook
The first question to ask when choosing a textbook is, what are you intending to do with it? And how does it fit with the way you teach? I used to tell state college students in Introduction to World History that their 2,400page twovolume textbook was just another perspective to compare with mine or to augment what I had to say in my lectures! Furthermore, exams would not draw directly from the text. The textbook was there primarily to keep me (and them) honest. I was appealing to their inherent need for perspective balance in any true intellectual inquiry. Hard to own such folly! But, okay, admit ityou’ve done this too. (And as they become more dependent on you and less inquiring, students start sharing or skipping the textbook.)
This model of instruction, by the way—“sage on the stage” lecturing to a largely passive audience—is passé with today’s enlightened instructional methods, which have finally filtered down (or up?) to higher education classrooms. Nevertheless, many instructors still choose slightly divergent textbooks that will allow students to question their learning or fill in the gaps, should they be motivated (miraculously) to do so. If this really is your goal in using a textbook, you probably should not teach introductory courses, because most beginners do not yet have the requisite attitudes and skills to use a textbook in this way. If you do teacher firsttier courses, reconsider your raison d’etre for textbook selection.
An alternative to choosing a textbook as an alter ego is to choose one for no other reason than that it covers course content far more comprehensively than you can or will in your classes. This textbook has it all, so that your digressions, rants, pet topics, areas of ignorance, and other inefficiencies or lapses do not necessarily compromise educational outcomes. Plus, you can use it to generate test items. I call this “covering” (as in “covering one’s ass”). Students, skipping classes, come to rely on this textbook (or its study guide) by default to acquire basic content, primarily in preparation for exams. If this is your intention, note that you cannot count on the college store to order the study guide without your say so; i.e., it would be inhumane to overlook it in the adoption process.
If you want complete control over student learning, are not concerned about “covering,” and write exams only from lectures, consider using a shadow text. This is a comprehensive outline of course content—à la Cliff Notes. Through instruction, you fill in the outline yourself for student consumption, and students study from their notes, referring to the outline only for the chronology of details. Note, however, that you need highly independent learners with good attendance to do this.
Using the textbook to teach is another matter. A textbook that teaches divides selected content into comparatively small and manageable chunks, has apparatus and pedagogy that guide readers through a learning process, and provides opportunities for selfassessment. This textbook is a tool for the student and is studentcentered. It places their learning above both you and the subject. As the textbook teaches, your role reverses somewhat, freeing you up to interact, elaborate, illustrate, facilitate, demonstrate, enchant—all the things that make the learning matter. This is harder, of course, so this choice is only for the good and the brave; but I believe it should be a mainstay of quality undergraduate education.
You may have other reasons for using (or not using) a textbook (even a good one) in your course. What are they?
Labels: choosing a textbook, college textbooks, course adoptions, evaluating textbooks
Choosing a Textbook for Your Course
This is the first 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.
As you know, choosing the right texts for your courses is often not as clear and straightforward as you hoped or assumed. Depending on your or your students’ degree of reliance on the textbook to acquire course content, the wrong one can confound learning, eat away class time, skew information, pauperize students (or provide inadequate return on investment), and even sabotage your instructional goals. What to do, then?
Perennial discontent with commercial textbooks has led some instructors to favor primary source material instead, or customized compilations, or interactive text web delivery of course content. The future is here in the form of modularized digitized text, learning objects, and images, delivered online. Distance learning without necessarily the distance. In some colleges across the country, institutions license textbooks that students access chapter by chapter via the intranet. It’s easy to go wrong with electronically delivered content too, but for now I will talk about print textbooks, which remain the norm.
In retrospect, as a college instructor in anthropology, sociology, and world history, I often chose the wrong textbooks. For a time the introductory cultural anthropology students were forced to construct an understanding of that field entirely through ethnographies alone. The physical anthropology students had to buy a lab manual in lieu of labs. The sociology students got a text that the department head later pointed out to me was written by a wellknown Marxist (I had simply liked the flowing “maninthestreet” narrative). And the undergraduate world history students got 2,400 pages of heavily documented text in two volumes and had to buy an atlas besides. I even taught a semester or two using a text I created with what today would be regarded as illegal photocopies. (Fair use definitions for academe were more liberal in the past, mainly through ignorance of copyright law.)
My subsequent career in higher education publishing gave me another perspective on textbook selection. I became enlightened on matters high and low regarding textbook acquisition, development, marketing, and sales. Much of what I have to say here reflects my twin backgrounds as textbook adopter and textbook developer, augmented by memories of textbooks I used as a student in the now distant past. I still remember my Magruder, Dobzhansky, and Harris, for example. What ones do you remember, and what made them stick with you? I keep a shelf of what I call heirloom textbooks, once great titles long out of print. My guidelines for choosing a textbook for your course refer also to these heirlooms. I also will have something to say about when to consider not using a textbook.
Labels: choosing a textbook, evaluating textbooks, textbook adoption, textbooks
Textbook from Heaven--Part 2
Textbook from Heaven: Exegesis
1. "The three-man author team seemed ideal—two experts, one hard side and one soft side, and a hand-on practitioner. Their idea for an introductory textbook, merging theory with practice, was innovative and exciting, and the house, known at that time for its small list of first-rate products, commissioned it. They sent a staff development editor to work with the team at their site on an urban campus in the Southwest. The situation was perfect. Development went very well and the group forged a strong and efficient author team. They worked together on four communicating computers, and manuscript flowed. The few reviews that were done, based on author contacts, glowed."
What a great start! What could possibly go wrong?
2. "Reviewers described the book as novel, brilliant, revolutionary, and much needed, challenging instructors to change the way they teach the course. Concerned that the book seemed quite different, the development editor requested information about the course and competition from Marketing. The marketing manager had left the company, however, and the position had not been filled. If a market survey had been done for the course or content area, nobody could find it. The company had three directly competing titles for the course, including one, the Cotton, which sold in excess of 50,000 copies annually. The inexperienced sponsoring editor, however, did not question market placement in relation to the internal competition."
Oh, oh. The development editor is right to be concerned. Publishers’ dustbins are full of books—even excellent books by excellent authors with excellent publishers—that were too different for their markets or too far ahead of their time. In addition, research consistently confirms that instructors do not adopt textbooks that force them to change fundamentally the way they teach their course. The sponsoring editor should have questioned this goal when it was first expressed. Heaven forefend, too, that instructors should have to discard desiccated and discolored lecture notes that crumble to the touch (I know, because after 40 years I still have mine--correction: I just threw mine out!).
This is not to say that publishers cannot risk innovation. Without a with-it marketing manager, however, and a long lead time for a marketing campaign, innovation of any magnitude is foolhardy. First editions are challenging enough! This project is starting dangerously without marketing input of any kind. Where is the cumulative intelligence on which successful lists are built? Publishing houses make a great mistake in decentralizing to the extent that everything connected with a worker disappears or is made irrelevant when the worker moves on.
And what about that internal competition? The sponsoring editor should have checked or asked the DE to perform a competition analysis that included the inhouse titles. Where does the sponsoring editor think this new title will fit in her list? What makes her think that the sales force will want to take market share from their own market leader? Where is this editor’s manager? (And why was this editor promoted?)
3. "A lot of money went into the project. The authors planned to provide original high quality supplements to accompany their textbook, encouraging the company to invest even more. Their package actually applied (rather than simply talked about) all the very latest research-based information on the most effective teaching and learning. The work also reflected a particular theoretical orientation of which the authors were quite proud. They felt that their treatment would scoop an emerging critical consensus and sweep the field. The company heaped praise on the authors and invested in a four-color design and a web site, at a time when text-dedicated web sites were new and not yet obligatory components of textbook packages."
More indication that this product’s excellence may not be able to overcome its singularity! Beware of book plans that boast impeccable intellectual descent, emerging critical consensus, and eponymous paradigm shifts. These often are euphemisms for point-of-view books or those with radical or reactionary approaches. Also beware of house-generated positive spin, which begets positive mind block, leading to what I call “the snow job effect.” Nothing is more embarrassing (or costly) than having everyone from the CEO down in love with an albatross in the guise of a technicolor angel. This is the “textbook from heaven” syndrome.
4. "The manuscript went into production complete and ahead of schedule, and production flowed smoothly. However, a marketing plan still did not exist except in the broadest outlines. When prepub sales figures came in below projections, this was attributed solely to the absence of a marketing manager’s ministrations. Sales figures did not improve, however, and efforts to jumpstart the book during the winter national sales meeting bombed. The sponsoring editor, who had recently been promoted and was duly distracted, excoriated the sales force for failing to sell what she claimed had to be one of the best books the company had ever published. The situation was summed up later, as one junior sales rep, unaware that he was chatting with that book’s development editor, said, 'I feel so sorry for those authors. Their book is just not getting sold. It’s so different that it makes it hard to present. And we’re doing so well with the Cotton. We all lead with the Cotton and then go to the other book we’re used to selling—the Freeman. A lot of profs use that one too. That new book just doesn’t come up.'”
Thus, the concept that books fail because they are not sold is not an urban legend circulating at corporate coffee kiosks or golf tees. In fairness, though, this book failed foremost because it was divorced from its market from the very beginning. At no point was it informed by market intelligence. And at no point was the market prepared for its introduction as a product. The sales force—the people in the trenches who really can turn things around—also was not prepared to field this product. In this case, the sales managers took the fall, and the book was never revised.
The idealistic authors, too, were not prepared for this outcome. Stunned, they accepted a Canadian edition and the slice-and-dice reuse of their content as online learning objects. They ended their collaboration, and none of them ever again attempted to write another textbook. I hope you understand that this is not right either. In addition to sparing stockholders bad news, I believe that publishers have a responsibility to spare authors this kind of experience.
Labels: commercial success and failure in textbook publishing, textbook publishing
Textbook from Heaven
Here is another mini case study--I call it Textbook from Heaven. Like the previous case study, Anatomy of a Monster, it probably speaks more to textbook editors and publishers while at the same time giving textbook authors a glimpse into the shadowy, confused world they may enter when they sign a publishing contract. This post contains the facts of the case; in my next post I offer my analysis.
Case Study: Textbook from Heaven
The three-person author team seemed ideal—two experts, one hard side and one soft side, and a hands-on practitioner. Their idea for an introductory textbook, merging theory with practice, was innovative and exciting then, and the house, known at the time for its small list of first-rate products, commissioned it. They sent a staff development editor to work with the team at their site on an urban campus in the Southwest. The situation was perfect. Development went very well and the group forged a strong and efficient author team. They worked together on four communicating computers, and manuscript flowed. The few reviews that were done, based on author contacts, glowed.
Reviewers described the book as novel, brilliant, revolutionary, and much needed, challenging instructors to change the way they teach the course. Concerned that the book might be too different, the DE requested information about the course and competing titles from Marketing. The marketing manager had left the company, however, and the position had not been refilled. If a market survey had been done for the course or content area, nobody could find it. The company had three directly competing titles for the course, including one, the Cotton, which sold in excess of 50,000 copies annually. The inexperienced sponsoring editor, however, did not question market placement in relation to internal competition.
A lot of money went into the project. The authors planned to provide original high quality supplements to accompany their textbook, encouraging the company to invest even more. Their package actually applied (rather than simply talked about) all the very latest research-based information on the most effective practices in the field. The work also reflected a particular theoretical orientation of which the authors were quite proud. They felt that their treatment would scoop an emerging critical consensus and sweep the field. The company heaped praise on the authors and invested in a four-color design and a web site, at a time when text-dedicated web sites were new and not yet regarded as obligatory components of textbook packages.
The manuscript went into production complete and ahead of schedule, and production flowed smoothly. However, a marketing plan still did not exist except in the broadest outlines. When prepub sales figures came in below projections, this was attributed solely to the absence of a marketing manager’s ministrations. Sales figures did not improve, however, and efforts to jumpstart the book during the winter national sales meeting bombed. The sponsoring editor, who had recently been promoted and was duly distracted, excoriated the sales force for failing to sell what she claimed had to be one of the best books the company had ever published. The situation was summed up later, as one junior sales rep, unaware that he was chatting with that book’s development editor, said, “I feel so sorry for those authors. Their book is just not getting sold. It’s so different that it makes it hard to present. And we’re doing so well with the Cotton. We all lead with the Cotton and then go to the other book we’re used to selling—the Freeman. A lot of profs use that one too. That new book just doesn’t come up.”
Labels: commercial success and failure in textbook publishing, textbook publishing
