Sunday, February 24, 2008
Adopting Mathematics Textbooks
Textbook adoption in many math areas is just around the corner. Our day at GHS, and listening to those wonderful speakers as they addressed many aspects of viewing textbooks, I found interesting and informative. There are many areas to look at. Of course, content, with minimal ambiguities, and specific relevance to the math area, be it, algebra, geometry or whatever, is of primary importance. The supplementary materials are an important factor as well, but certainly, as was addressed in the inservice, readability is a huge part of choosing the student friendly mathematics textbook. As we go through this process over the coming months we will concider the areas suggested by the speaker. Legibility of print, graphs, charts, pictures, colors, descriptions of the pictures and appropriateness of labels and placements within the topics discussed are all areas to be looked at.
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4 comments:
Perfect response to what should be adressed when choosing textbooks for any subject. The speaker's comments provoked a good bit of discussion and thought at the various tables. Hopefully, many participants on the textbook selection committees were at this Literacy Day presentation.
pwr
Unless things change drastically for the next textbook adoption, the books for the theory level are not very readable for high school students. The book we use now is really a college text, at that reading level, not much white space, and not many "pictures". The graphs are not very eye-catching in my opinion.
The concepts level book is much more appealing on a HS level.
I totally agree. We certainly need to change our view on how we choose textbooks, especially since math texts contain more information per page than any other content textbook. I will bring this topic up to Dianne Steelman at our next Math Department Chairs' meeting. Project RAISSE is really opening our eyes, not only to the strategies we use but the materials as well.
I totally agree with you. The textbooks the students have now are not very user-friendly. I do believe that the teachers can influence the DO to purchase books that better suit the reader in our students.
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