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Evaluating an open textbook is similar to evaluating any textbook. To begin, let’s look at the qualities that make a good textbook, whether it’s open or not.
What are the qualities of a good textbook?
You have probably reviewed many textbooks in your career and have your own set of evaluation guidelines. Before we begin looking at the criteria that various open textbook projects are using to evaluate the textbooks in their collections, let’s review some of the qualities and structures that make up a textbook.
Pedagogical aids for textbooks
When it comes to textbooks, there is no doubt that the content of the book is important. You want to be sure that the content in the textbook aligns with the learning outcomes of your course and that the content is written at the right level for your learners.
However, a good textbook is more than a collection of facts. Textbooks also contain a number pedagogical aids, which are features or attributes of the book that help a learner understand the content being presented.
There are a number of common pedagogical aids in textbooks, including:
- Chapter objectives
- Chapter learning outcomes
- Chapter outlines
- Chapter summaries or reviews
- Checklists
- Headings and subheadings
- Bold and italicized text
- Tables of contents
- Tables of figures
- Indexes
- Focus questions and practice questions
- Case studies, vignettes, and examples of best practices
- Glossary and key terms
- Demonstrations and simulations
- Maps and timelines
- Illustrations, including photos, charts, diagrams, and figures
- Multimedia
- Pronunciation guides
Usefulness of pedagogical aids in textbooks
Of these pedagogical aids, which are the ones that students actually use and find useful? Weiten, Guadagno & Beck (1996) surveyed 134 students asking them how familiar they were with the different pedagogical aids in their textbooks.[1] They also asked the students the probability they would use each pedagogical aid and their perceived value of each aid. With their research, Weiten, Guadagno, and Beck showed that the top three pedagogical aids that students used in textbooks were boldfaced technical terms, chapter and section summaries, and glossaries.
In his 2003 research Pedagogical Aids and Student Performance, Gurung surveyed more than 200 undergraduate students and asked them to rate the usefulness of 10 pedagogical aids and instructional techniques. [2]Gurung’s research wasn’t specific to textbook aids, but did include a number of textbook-specific aids, like outlines, chapter summaries and reviews, boldfaced and italicized terms, and key terms and practice questions found in textbooks. When you eliminate the non-textbook–related aids from Gurung’s research, we find that the top textbook aids used by students were boldfaced terms, italicized terms, and practice questions. Chapter summaries and reviews was a very close fourth.
In terms of helpfulness, students rated boldfaced (92%) and italicized (81%) terms as the most useful pedagogica