This article presents Oregon State University's experience launching an innovative Open Textbook initiative in spring 2014. The partners, Open Oregon State and the Oregon State University Libraries and Press, aimed to reduce the cost of course materials for students while ensuring the content created was peer-reviewed and employed multimedia…

Describes some of the elements that the author deliberately incorporated in his writing of textbooks. Two categories are discussed: some general guiding principles, and more minor technical features. (CS)

The aim of this paper is to consider some issues in the historical international development of science education making comparisons between the educational systems of Britain and the United States of America. The author's particular interest relates to the role of the textbook in science education, so this is area on which this study will…

This paper examines departmental introductory communication course (ICC) textbook publishing practices. Two methodologies for the creation of campus-specific texts are examined--the use of a national publishing house and the use of a local commercial printer. Both options deliver unique advantages and liabilities for speech communication…

Strategies for writing a text are offered by a college professor on the basis of his own experience of writing a text on social psychology. Suggestions are given on creating an efficient office environment, researching the topic, and drafting the manuscript. One way to improve efficiency is to compress teaching into a few days, leaving the…

The concern of this paper is with techniques for improving the understandability of statistics textbooks for novices. Understandability is measured by tests of the reader's performance on creative transfer problems that require using text material in novel situations. The focus is primarily on the instructional objective of conceptual…

Until the end of the last century the school textbook served only one purpose, which was to educate; today, faced with competition from the media, it also must be attractive. The development of the textbook over the last century has been characterized, on one hand, by greater diversity, and hence greater complexity, in the typographical methods…

Authors of texts for instruction in English as a second language have several options for publishing: the traditinal method, dealing directly with large, well-known publishers, or with smaller, specialized houses, or with author-formed groups. This process begins with an idea, and involves making contacts and submitting proposals, review and…

Perestroika and glasnost are not only influencing the economic and social structure of Soviet society, but also have led to a revision of the authorized history of the USSR as Soviet historians struggle to create a national history based on fact instead of dogma. The Soviet history profession itself is also undergoing a major self-examination, as…

This monograph describes the experience of Israeli curriculum developers as they wrote textbooks of regional geography for the primary and junior high school levels. There are three parts to the paper. Part I discusses the reform of the geography curriculum in Israeli schools in the 1960s. The new curriculum emphasized three areas: geography of…

Texts in educational psychology have been criticized because they allegedly fail to define the subject matter domain of the field, because they are written for instructors rather than students, and because no consistent theoretical position is taken. The fact that different texts stress different sets of data does not mean they fail to define the…

These are the reflections of a textbook author in the course of revising a secondary school textbook. While the average life of a textbook is five years, many stay in schools for much longer. A textbook author or editor must therefore attempt to produce a book that will be relevant and meaningful for children years in the future. This involves the…

The relationship of contextual background to comprehension of written texts is discussed with reference to instruction in English as a second language (ESL). A theory advanced by Kerry Stewart Robichaux proposes six possible relationships between a text and its cultural "frame." Applications of the six text-frame relationships to foreign…

This paper discusses the needs of high school students and teachers that writers and publishers of psychology materials and textbooks should keep in mind. To take students' needs into consideration, publishers should stress practical application and relevance of subject matter, provide opportunities for interaction with peers, aim reading…

Unfortunately, textbooks of the elementary and junior high school levels receive very little of the honest, critical evaluation which is given trade books in children's literature. One vivid example of this fact was seen in the recent arduous but successful attempt to include "Beowul" in a fourth-grade literature text which was being…