Textbooks
Textbooks
Sunday, 4 April 2010
I wish I had managed to get a photo. On my last day at the United World College of Costa Rica at the beginning of this week, I was walking through the residences on a guided tour of the campus. Suddenly a girl from Spain approached me with a heavily highlighted, dog-eared copy of the paperback 4th edition of my book, Planet Geography. Opening the page with the author’s photograph, she asked me “is this you?”.
Feeling a little embarrassed at the celebrity status being accorded me in front of my colleagues, I acknowledged that it was, and that she had done extraordinarily well to recognise me from the small photograph (which had been taken about three years ago in Iceland). She told me that she had used the book while in Spain, and had brought the book with her to Costa Rica as she had found it so helpful. At her request, I was delighted to write a short message to her in the front of book - who knows, maybe one day it will make some money for her on e-Bay ☺
It was a great encouragement to meet this young woman who had found my writing helpful for her studies. I mention this because there is a growing tendency in some circles to devalue the role and the impact of textbooks, with some educators going so far as to suggest that students would be better off by abandoning the secure framework of textbooks and relying solely on teachers’ information (photocopied from textbooks???), the internet and magazines.
Even leaving aside for a moment the relative reliability of books versus the internet, research published by Professor Mike Askew and Dr Jeremy Hogden of King’s College in the UK this week revealed that abandoning textbooks significantly lowers educational achievement. Indeed, the two researchers blamed the reduced use of textbooks as a contributing factor in Britain’s deteriorating performance in international testing. In the words of the report “Countries that perform consistently well use carefully constructed textbooks as the primary means of teaching. By comparison, use of textbooks in English schools is relatively low and English textbooks use routine examples and are less coherent than those in other countries. Pupils in high-performing countries (such as China, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore) are also more likely to use textbooks at home than their English counterparts”.
Furthermore, the report noted that frequent curriculum reforms tend to lower the quality of teaching resources because the rapid pace of change limits the time available to develop and trial textbooks, especially where several publishers are competing for market share. As a result, the research found that British textbooks tended to be “less coherent” than books published elsewhere.
The report also noted that educators in China had expressed surprise during the research phase by noting that Western schools tended not to expect students to do extra work by themselves from textbooks at home - self-directed homework is an expected part of the educational process in most parts of Asia.
Of course, textbooks are not the whole answer to learning success, especially when they are used in isolation or simply memorised by rote. Textbooks should be the starting point, not the end point, for students as they grapple to master important content, concepts and skills. Nonetheless, it was great to see that at least one student at the United World College of Costa Rica does takes a serious - and dare I say Chinese - approach to her geography studies by using what I hope she (and others) find to be a very sound textbook!.
Footnote: the covers of the books I have written can be seen HERE.
The bookshelf in my office where I keep a copy of each of the books I have written