Discerning Pedagogical Tools from Impediments: A Comment on Schacht's Review of Statistics Textbooks

Abstract

One of the texts that Dr. Schacht purports to review is (sic) and Becker's Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed. I'm very familiar with this text since I've been using it in my own statistics classroom since it came out last January. The senior author of this text, as is clearly printed on its front cover and elsewhere, is James Jaccard (Jaccard and Becker 1990). Please note the correct spelling. This is not an isolated typographical error in Dr. Schacht's review. His review is incorrect at every point in the document. How can something as basic as correct citation of the senior author of a text under review make it through this entire process and be so blatantly wrong? I understand that in print there is great similarity between a capital C and a capital G, but I also think that if we're going to adopt the mission of writing and publishing reviews that are intended to be helpful to the discipline's teachers (your own mission statement, inside front cover of Teaching Sociology), we should be able to assume that those who write, review, and edit such articles are held to a standard which is higher than a glance. There is further evidence that a low standard is being used here. Dr. Schacht displays the results of his START scale evaluation of texts in Table 3 (Schacht 1990, p. 394). I notice that Jaggard and Becker are assigned a zero on the criterion Has a section on summation notation. Jaccard and Becker do have such a section; it is integrated into the first chapter beginning on page 14. So did Dr. Schacht write this essay using only the tables of contents of the texts he reviewed? Granted, Jaccard and Becker's table of contents merely shows a major section called Mathematical Preliminaries: A Review beginning on page 14. The first subhead on page 14, however, is Summation Notation-a section which includes definitions, procedures, examples, and review exercises on the summation terminology to be used in the text. This section has worked well in my classroom; I am astounded that Dr. Schacht does not seem to know it exists. He may have scanned the table of contents, but he does not seem to have read to page 14. We're back to the cursory glance standard, and this too does not seem to have been noticed by any subsequent reviewer. What then do I make of Table 3? I already know there is at least one error of one point on a scale whose maximum realized value is 4 and whose minimum is 0. Should I place any amount of confidence in the rest of the table? Are there other evaluations in this table which result in a START scale which can at best be taken as accurate with an error of plus or minus 25 percent? I respect the mission of your journal, and I like to think that it does it well. I would suggest, though, that something has gone very wrong here, and the review process either did not catch it or supported it. It should not be that tough to get an author's name right; why aren't we paying enough attention to doing it? And if we aren't paying enough attention to getting our data right, the material we publish is making up a reality that isn't actually there. I continue to hope we can trust the accuracy of material in our professional journals. In this case, however, there seems to be some question whether Dr. Schacht's article is, in the words of his own title, a pedagogical tool or an impediment to learning (Schacht 1990, p. 390). I would strongly suggest that anyone faced with textbook decisions in statistics use Dr. Schacht's review with great caution and be certain to check his evaluation against the texts themselves.