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
posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 3:30 PM
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