The authors evaluated principles of macroeconomics textbooks for readability using Coh-Metrix, a computational linguistics tool. Additionally, they conducted an experiment on Amazon's Mechanical Turk Web site in which participants ranked the readability of text samples. There was a wide range of scores on readability indexes both among…

Introductory psychology students at a technical college, 2-year community college, and a regional university rated how important textbook chapters or topics were to them now and in the future and how interesting they were. Importance and interest ratings were highly correlated, and the whole course was rated of greater importance and interest than…

Textbook management in universities is an integral component of teaching management. With gradual development of university education teaching, textbook management in China universities can no longer keep pace with the steps of the teaching management, and the work of textbook management is faced up with new challenges. This article makes an…

As the demographics of the Australian population changes, it is essential for the public education system to not only cater for the needs of the new community groups that form but also to help ensure that education is used as a vehicle to facilitate social harmony, understanding and equality. The link between disadvantaged and marginalised…

Many middle school teachers lack adequate criteria to critically select materials that represent a variety of L2 teaching models. This study analyzes the illustrated and written content of 33 ELL textbooks to determine the range of L2 teaching models represented. The researchers asked to what extent do middle school ELL texts depict frequency and…

What do principals need to know about the use of electronic textbooks? Students, referred to as the Millennials or the Net Generation, born between 1980 and the present, have very different learning styles than those of previous generations. They were born into a world of everyday applications of technology and have utilized it from a very young…

Since Finnish is not an Indo-European language, studying foreign languages in general and then also studying special fields through the medium of foreign languages may provide an extra difficulty for Finnish students. Most university language centres in Finland have organized reading comprehension courses in several foreign languages for the…

This paper investigates three English textbooks for primary classes 4, 5 and 6 in Ghana from the "Gateway to English for Primary Schools" series, and their complementary teachers' guides, in order to determine the assumptions about teaching and learning which the books embody. The paper pays particular attention to the approach to…

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…

Textbooks are often a core element of curricula and delivery of classroom instruction and have long been a source of controversy. The textbook adoption process has become less about content and more about political/cultural pressure. Special-interest groups from the right and left exert enormous influence on textbook content through bias and…

Technological innovation is driving fundamental changes in all aspects of our lives. This is especially true of digital content, as our use of e-books, downloadable music, streaming television and movies, and online social networks has exploded. However, the explosive growth in our use of digital content seems so far to have eluded many of the 50…

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…

Provides guidelines for evaluation in textbook selection. (MD)