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 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
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
