Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page 4) Designing Today’s Mainstream Textbooks If you’ve picked up a leading secular textbook lately, you undoubtedly were impressed by the bright, alluring pic tures and attractive graphics. These modern texts differ greatly from the old school books, heavy with text but little color or white space. Surely these appealing new texts offer students superior learning tools. Perhaps you’re even using one currently in your own classroom. Ironically, textbook experts find much to criticize in what some call “coffee table textbooks.” What Houghton Mifflin introduced in the late 1980s as the DK, or Dorling Kindersley, format for juvenile nonfic tion is now accepted product development for all the major publishers of textbooks through high school. Characterized by illustrative photography, colorful graphics, and minimal text, the DK style swept the textbook industry, and some claim is a “major contributor to dumbing down textbooks and finishing off narrative.”1 Reviewers for textbooks in all disciplines describe books overflowing with photographs, maps, graphs, drawings, charts, sidebars, lots of white space, and very little text. The text that does exist is characterized by short sentences and paragraphs. These pages are visually appealing, certainly, but are they pedagogically effective? Many experts claim they are, in fact, educationally harm ful. In a review of middle school science books, John Hubisz complains, “When I pick up something that claims to be a ‘textbook,’ I expect a book of text. Yet, in our study, we found mostly pictures, sidebars, and capsules that interrupted what little text there was. . . . How can middle school students, ages 11–14, concentrate with such a barrage of information?” He adds, “When a book pur ports to be about physical science, I expect to find science. 1 Gilbert Sewall, “California Textbook Adoption,” The American Textbook Council (2005) http://www.historytextbooks.org/california.htm. But the texts we reviewed were filled with irrelevant information.”2 Experts in the discipline of mathematics claim similar problems with design and content. Tom VanCourt, a college professor and reviewer of precollege math textbooks, ac knowledges improvements in a 2001 edition of a prealgebra high school textbook from a leading publisher. But he com plains that the book “still presents a mad whirl of poorly connected topics, still flaunts distracting pictures and ac tivities by the score, still suffers from severe defects in its organization and its attempts to deal with mathematical 2 John Hubitz, “Middle-School Texts Don’t Make the Grade” Physics Today, Vol. LVI, No. 5 (May 2003), p. 51. page 4 Teacher to Teacher | March 2008 http://www.historytextbooks.org/california.htm
Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page Intro) Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page 1) Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page 2) Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page 3) Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page 4) Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page 5) Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page 6) Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page 7) Teacher to Teacher - March 2008 - (Page 8)
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