This study reports on how a heterogeneous mixed-ability large class (63 students) turned into a cohesive and functioning class. To promote learner autonomy, students were made responsible to identify their own needs and objectives. The participants of this study consisted of undergraduate chemistry students who had taken the English for General…

Sales figures and recollections of psychologists indicate textbooks play a central role in psychology students' education, yet instructors typically must select texts under time pressure and with incomplete information. Although selection aids are available, none adequately address the accuracy of texts. We describe a technique for sampling…

This article draws upon the author's experiences with designing and teaching a lower-level undergraduate course, Geography and Gender. It is proposed that there is a relative lack of resources available for conducting geography courses on gender, feminism, and/or sexuality and as such, this article addresses issues of text selection, course…

This article reports on the development and use of an inclusive process to select a departmental textbook for general psychology. It describes a method for developing department-specific instruments to narrow the available textbook choices and an in-class textbook trial used in the final selection. Reported advantages of this method include…

The authors investigate whether the choice of college textbook affects students' comprehension of the material. Forty-eight students from educational psychology courses were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (1) unfamiliar passages drawn from the textbook used in the course, or (2) comparable passages selected from a competitor textbook.…

This article examines the process by which college-level foreign language programs evaluate and select instructional materials for beginning level courses. A review of the relevant literature reveals an ambivalent relationship with textbooks, often the default curriculum for language courses. Despite textbooks' apparent key role in language…

This research analyzed the most widely used foundations of education textbooks for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) content. Because foundations of education coursework routinely introduces other diversity topics in education, the authors hold it is a good place to introduce LGBT topics. The ways in which LGBT topics are included in…

Faced with selecting a geometry curriculum for our preservice elementary teacher mathematics course, we used a mixed-methods study to investigate the effectiveness, with respect to student achievement and student perception, of three reform-oriented curricula. ANCOVA results indicate students using one of the curricula scored significantly higher…

Little research has focused on what factors undergraduate students consider when selecting books at academic libraries. In order to better understand student book choices at Niagara University Library, we chose 11 sets of two books with the same LC subject headings but with other differences and asked students to select one book over another.…

Professors have long assigned to their students works of which they were the author. The practice ranges from assigning commercially published textbooks they have written to having students buy a volume they have written and published or course packs made up of their own materials they have photocopied. Not only individual professors, but also…

While college composition theory/pedagogy courses are standard offerings in composition and rhetoric graduate programs, specialized basic writing graduate courses lag behind. At the same time, there is a pressing need for highly qualified teachers of nontraditional adult students, especially in community college and adult literacy education…

Over the past decade, the importance of multiword lexical units has been receiving an extraordinary amount of attention, and is now almost a must-have component in the practice of English language teaching. The field of English for Business Purposes was among the first to recognize the uniqueness of multiword units, establishing the initial…

Students don't hang on to textbooks anymore, and the prevalence of second-hand merchandise obliges publishers to recoup their costs the first semester after a new release. Thus, those publishers are loath to experiment with novel approaches and are hypersensitive about reviewer criticism. Steven I. Dutch, who spent a decade preparing an…

The purpose of this paper was to compare attitudes and behaviors of respondents toward members of other cultural groups. This paper presents the results of a Multicultural Attitude Survey conducted with a random sample of 122 respondents ranging in education level from grade 9 to university graduate students. The survey was adapted from a similar…

Given the professed orientation toward proficiency development in the foreign language teaching profession, the inclination of textbook authors and publishers to offer communicative activities should be quite strong. This study analyzed the learning activities of six popular first-year college German textbooks and found that half the texts provide…