Textbooks and Teaching: A Lesson from Students

Abstract

Doctoral degrees are awarded in curriculum and instruction. Annual compendia offer strategies for improving classroom teaching performance. Methods for interacting with students, raising their interest and increasing their achievement are taught in workshops, conferences and education classes across the nation. The only element in the teaching mix that receives little attention is the backbone of almost every college course: the textbook.1 This study is an assessment of college textbooks by the second most authoritative source: the students who use them. The investigation appraises the value of college texts as perceived by a general population of students at two U.S. universities. These general findings about texts are compared with findings about mass communication textbooks from a sample of such students at a wide variety of programs across the country. The study offers a depth probe of the specific aspects of a textbook that college students say make it either a valuable learning tool or an impediment to learning. As perhaps the only study of its kind, and with a sample of 1,170 students, the findings offer some surprisingly satisfying outcomes for mass communication teachers and recommendations of what all teachers should consider before adopting a textbook. Background With so much riding on textbooks - teachers building their content around the text and expecting students to learn from the text - it is peculiar that so few empirical studies exist about college textbooks. This review presents what is known about college textbooks and offers considerations about the content and presentation of college texts that underpin the study's hypotheses. Research studies on mass communication texts are reviewed. College textbooks. Instructors at the college level have considerable latitude in selecting a text compared with their pre-college peers,2 and the research is clear about textbooks' instructional value. They serve as effective tools in improving the quality of education and have great influence on teaching and learning.3 For college teachers, texts develop guidance to the subject and can help measure how students' motivation is influenced by the nature of academic tasks in classrooms.4 Textbooks provide uniform content for individual college students to study according to their own ability, motivate greater involvement and help instructors, especially the beginners, to design their courses.5 Students find textbooks easier to read than primary source material, which leads to higher self-efficacy perceptions for understanding the course and more motivated behavior for students. Students are most affected when texts provide clear and comprehensible information that is neither too similar nor too contradictory to their current knowledge.6 A text's readability is an important consideration even at the college level. The same readability formulas used to assess mass media are employed for textbooks with nearly the same result: debate about the formulas' ability to determine a text's grade level and whether sentence structure equates to clarity of meaning.7 Yet the text's reading level is considered extremely important to student success in a class.8 In all, the literature views college textbooks as being equally essential to students' understanding and achievement as those at pre-college levels, with the additional advantage being that teachers have more responsibility in selecting texts. Textbook content criteria. Because most college faculty do choose their own texts, what should they look for and what might students suggest about a helpful text? The content is divided into three areas: (a) the textual writing, (b) the cues that help interpret the writing, and (c) all other aspects of a textbook. Of the three content dimensions, textual writing has received the most research attention because it deals with reading skills, readability and cognitive aspects of the learning process. …