Textbook

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Definition

According to Wikipedia, retrieved 12:26, 8 August 2007 (MEST), “a textbook is a manual of instruction or a standard book in any branch of study. They are produced according to the demand of the educational institutions. Textbooks are usually published by one of the four major publishing companies. Although most textbooks are only published in printed format, some can now be viewed online.”

Textbook is a teaching tool (material) which presents the subject matter defined by the curriculum. A university textbook is required to contain the complete overview of the subject, including the theories, as well as to be of a more permanent character.(CARNet, retrieved 12:26, 8 August 2007 (MEST)).

Principles of textbook writing

Firstly, textbook writing is related to instructional design and therefore you should think in terms of some instructional design models and methods. Probably most authors should use at least some kind of backwards design, i.e. define what students are supposed to be able to do (e.g. solve problems) and then write the books that enables them to do so.

However, textbook writing is a specific activity and we will try to figure out a few fundamental principles here.

Objectives

There are several ways to manage objectives (each ISD model or extensions like the Kemp will tell you more). Often, advise on writing textbooks suggests to plan book chapters in terms of desired learning level outcomes.

Pedagogical objectives

Lerning objectives

For example, the IOWA writing assistant identifies 6 levels of emphasis based on Bloom's taxonomy of learning that we reproduce here exactly as defined in Applying your results (retrieved 20:03, 27 July 2007 (MEST)):

  1. Knowledge: rote memorization, recognition, or recall of facts.
  2. Comprehension: understanding what the facts mean.
  3. Application: correct use of the facts, rules, or ideas.
  4. Analysis: breaking down information into component parts.
  5. Synthesis: combination parts to make a new whole.
  6. Evaluation: judging the value or worth of information or ideas.

Depending on your objectives you may put different emphasis on each level. You then can then define objectives, activities, assessment for the book as a whole but also for each chapter.

Here is an example for Synthesis. Target students are students in educational technology. They have to prepare an e-Text about e-learning standards as an activity.

  • Objective: "By the end of this section, you (as a student) will be able to design a learning object that introduces key components of e-learning standards, and in particular modeling languages.
  • Activities: Make your own summary of the most important concepts you can find in articles on and then design of a course module with eXe
  • Assessment: The course module
  • Key Words: Design, formulate, build, invent, create, compose, generate, derive, modify, develop.

Objectives then can written out at the start of chapters and/or sections and activities inserted where appropriate. Hints for self-assessment can added too.

Language and organization of contents

According to Jones (2005), textbook writers have three choices: simplification, easyfication, or the scaffolding of concept knowledge. We shall summarize some prescriptions can be derived from this article.

Simplification strategies - enhanced cohesion/coherence
  • simplification of content: explain new technical terms as they arise
  • simplification of form: make sure that the text has cohesive links and restores implicit relationships, e.g. when using general-specific of problem-solution progressions.
  • simplification by including explanations and exemplifications
  • using similar structures, i.e. syntactic repetition acts as a form of syntactic scaffolding.

Note that simplification may turn against learning. For example NcNamara et al. (1996) found that “text coherence improved readers' comprehension, but also that giving readers with sufficient background knowledge an incoherent text that forced them to infer unstated relations engaged them in compensatory processing, allowing deeper text understanding than might occur with a coherent text.”

Easification strategies - enhancing structure

The purpose easification is to “give learners an additional instructional appahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbookratus by developing a kind of "access structure" around the text without his [sic] having gone through the intervening stages of simplified materials” Bhatia cited by Jones (2005:9). Examples of such devices are:

  • Provide introductory paragraph(s) to a text (or text segment)
  • Provide a structural analysis ('tagging' sections) to a text (or text segment), e.g. as in Advance Organizers.
  • Provide a schematic representation of a text (or text segment)
  • Add annotations/explanations to the text, e.g. marginalia
  • Add metadiscursive commentaries (before, in the middle, or after)
  • Add questions to encourage interactions with the text
Scaffolding - providing domain knowledge

“Scaffolding in the sense intended here means the provision of a series of carefully designed pre-task exercises (or activities) which allow students to familiarize themselves with concepts of increasing complexity and to explore these concepts in terms of their reactances and interrelations.” Jones (2005:10)

Typical activities can be:

  • filling in gapped texts
  • complete sentences
  • propositional clusters
  • produce or complete tables and flow charts
  • write summaries of various sorts, e.g. include critique, most things relevant, organize information, etc.

Note that these activities can be assigned by teacher, i.e. must not necessarily be part of the text itself.

Chapter elements

Most textbooks are written with a sort of direction instruction model in mind. However, this is not an obligation. On the other hand, teachers engaged in other pedagogical approaches do not necessarily use textbooks, but rather a combination of manuals and "normal" academic texts.

But in any case, chapters should be planned also in terms of various functional elements and that also may show visually. This chapter is partly based on Lepionka (2003), chapters 8-10.

Overview and introduction

Lepionka (2003:117-118,123) distinguishes four major elements:

Openers
Express “subject, theme, aims, topics, and organization of a chapter [... readers should] know at the outset what they are reading and why or to what end” (Lepionka 2003:117). E.g. if you follow Gagné's nine events of instruction then you should include

something to motivate and gain attention (step 1), something to help the frame and organize (step 2) and something to recall prior knowledge (step 3).

Closers
Give students opportunities to review, reinforce, or extend their learning, i.e. help with transfer (Lepionka 2003:118)
Internal Pedagogical Devices
Feature Strands


Learning objectives

Organizers

Case studies, scenarios, vignettes

Quotations and epigrams

Pictures

Conclusion and summary

List of definitions

Review questions

Transfer aids

Self-assessment

Further reading

Typographic Design

Titles

Marginalia

Strong text

Crossreferences

Boxes

Textbook research

There are various strands of textbook research .... (this chapter needs to be completed some day)

Discussion

Cultural differences

Textbooks are particularly important in the mainstream US Educational system that has strong roots in more traditional instructional design.

Most of Europe's higher education system is somewhat different

  • On one hand more emphasis is put on "Bildung" (education) as opposed to training. Students are supposed to organize knowledge themselves and be able to cope with all sorts of more primary materials (e.g. real academic books and articles).
  • Professors are supposed to develop their own lecture (and views). These actually may be considered "spoken textbooks" since often students are just supposed to reproduce contents at exams. University teachers also have a fairly low teaching load (e.g. about 6 hours) since their main job is to do research.

Both of these features (that are in contradiction) make textbooks not very popular in standard universities. However, in most European countries there are higher education institutions with little research and high teaching loads, such as the Swiss Universities of Applied Sciences and these have a lot in common with American "teaching universities".

The dumbing down question

Critiques of textbooks often claim that there can be dumbing down effect, in particular since some textbook authors indeed overdo simplification. But one must clearly distinguish between (1) the general question whether systematic use of textbooks (as in teaching universities) can have a dumbing down effect and the (2) the question whether some textbooks are too easy and aim too low and whether this is a global trend in education.

Links

General
Advice on writing textbooks
Examples of (technical) author guidelines
Electronic textbooks
Discussions

"A Textbook for All Students"], by William J. Bennetta, The Textbook Letter, May-June 1997.

Revisited] by M.E. Lepionka, Society Of Academic Authors.

Software

See various writing tools for a longer list of tools and a discussion of various writing tool categories.

References

Textbook understanding

  • Conderman, Greg; Elf, Nanci (2007), What's in This Book? Engaging Students through a Textbook Exploration Activity, Reading & Writing Quarterly, v23 n1 p111-116 Jan-Mar 2007.

Practical Textbook and book writing

  • Alley, M. 1996 The Craft of Scientific Writing (3rd Ed.). Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. ISBN 0-387-94766-3
  • Ben-Ari, M., Walker, H. M., Redvers-Mutton, G., and Mansfield, K. 2002. Writing a textbook. In Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference on innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (Aarhus, Denmark, June 24 - 28, 2002). ITiCSE '02. ACM Press, New York, NY, 94-95. DOI 10.1145/544414.544444 (Summary of a panel discussion).
  • Dale, N., Mercer, R., Koffman, E., and Savitch, W. 2001. Writing a textbook: walking the gauntlet. SIGCSE Bull. 33, 1 (Mar. 2001), 408-409. Abstract (summary of a panel discussion)
  • Forbes, David J., (1996), Make History Textbook Writing "A Puzzlement", The History Teacher. Vol. 29, No. 4 (Aug., 1996), pp. 455-461. JSTOR Bitmap/POF
  • Hatch, Mary Jo (2007). Writing From Teaching: A Textbook Writer's Tale, Journal of Management Education, Vol. 31, No. 3, 405-412 (2007). DOI 10.1177/1052562906298443
  • Lepionka, Mary Ellen (2003), Writing and Developing Your College Textbook, ISBN 0-9728164-0-2. (This practical book gets good reviews. I bought it and find it useful - Daniel K. Schneider)
  • Lepionka, Mary Ellen (2005), Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements ISBN 0-9728164-1-0
  • Silverman, Franklin H. (2004), Self-Publishing Textbooks and Instructional Materials, ISBN 0-9728164-3-7
  • Thirlway, M. 1994 Writing Software Manuals: a Practical Guide. Prentice-Hall, Inc. ISBN 0-13-138801-0
  • Ranking, Elizabeth, The Work of Writing: Insights and Strategies for Academics and Professionals, Wiley, ISBN: 978-0-7879-5679-0

Research on textbook writing

  • Bhatia, V. K. Simplification v. Easification: The Case of Legal Texts. Applied Linguistics 4(1), pp. 39-78.
  • Jones, Alan (2005) Conceptual Development in Technical and Textbook Writing: A Challenge for L1 and L2 Student Readers, Proceedings of the International Professional Communication Conference, Limerick, Ireland, 12-15 July, 2005. PDF - Abstract
  • McNamara, D.S., Kintsch, E., Songer, N.B. and Kintsch, W. (1996). "Are good texts always better? Interactions of text coherence, background knowledge, and levels of understanding in learning from text", Cognition and Instruction, v14 n1 p1-43.

Instructional objectives

See also: instructional design and instructional design method in particular.

  • Felder, Richard M. and Rebecca Brent (1997). Objectively Speaking, Chemical Engineering Education, 31(3), 178-179 (1997). HTML reprint
  • Gronlund, N.E. (1991)- How to write and use instructional objectives (4th ed.) New York, Macmillan.

Various textbook research

  • Mary Ann Trail, Carolyn Gutierrez and David Lechner (2006)., Reconsidering a Traditional Instruction Technique: Reassessing the Print Workbook, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 32, Issue 6, November 2006, Pages 632-640.

(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W50-4M93P9D-1/2/0ee35c9332ba03d259174db224262317 Abstract)

Textbooks and the evolution of the school system

  • Apple, Michael W., and Linda K. Christian-Smith, eds. The Politics of the Textbook. New York: Routledge, 1991.
  • Altbach, Philip G., Gail P. Kelly, Hugh G. Petrie, and Lois Weiss, eds. Textbooks in American Society: Politics, Policy, and Pedagogy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.
  • Schlafly, Phyllis (1996). The Dumbing Down of America's Colleges, Eagle Forum 29:9 (has to do more with a critique of the school system)
  • Gionfriddo, Jeanne Jarema, The Dumbing Down of Textbooks: An Analysis of Six Textbook Editions during a Twelve Year Span. M.A. Thesis, Kean College of New Jersey.