provocative opinion Textbook Axiom: Bigger Isn't Always Better Sheldon H. Cohen Washburn University, Topeka, KS 66621
A few days ago I received a publisher's request to complete a questionnaire on one of their undergraduate textbooks. Since it is the professional responsibility of every faculty member to help improve the quality of available teaching aids and the oublishers were also offering a bribe of a free tradebook, I sat down to ponder which boxto check. Most of the questions were standard fare-Was a particular took covered adequately? Should a given section-he rewritten in the new edition? But one question caused the evangelistic spirit that lurks below the surface of most professors to explode in me. "In order to include recent discoveries should this undergraduate textbook, which now contains 1100 pages, he allowed to expand to 1400 pages in the next edition?" I t is true that this book is for a iunior-senior course (Inorganic Chrmiitry), hut what student cnnaisimilate 1100 owes. let alone 140U'? Some imoorfanf auesrions which w r en't on the questionaire need tb he raised. 1) What is the purpose of the text?The completeness and approach used (and therefore size) will vary considerably depending on whether the hook is to he principally a reference work or a tool to help students learn a subject. Too many authors have tried to do hoth and ended up doing hoth poorly. 2) Who will be the audience for the book? Will they he undergraduates, graduates, or other faculty members? From my reading of the huge stack of new chemistry hooks, it appears that in some cases the most important readers must he fellow professors who serve on tenure and promotion
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committees. How else can one explain the deluge of new texts, for example in freshmen chemistry, that just rehash other, earlier works. 3) Can additional pages do any damage? The answer to this question is a resounding yes. The first thing most students do after buying their textbook is t o look it over rapidly to see what is ahead for them. A thousand-plus-page work will generally send them off into depressions. Young students, who are not noted for their ability to distinguish the important from the trivial, are buried under an avalanche of information. This often results in a student's policy of trying to memorize everything and understanding nothing. 4) Can shorter textbooks be written? From the rapid inflation in texthook size in recent years, one must wonder. The same process has been taking place in class hours. Twocredit courses have become three, three credit hours have been pushed to four, and so forth. There never appears to be enough time or pages to cover all the material. This statement appears to be true unless we recognize that the purpose of a formal education isn't to cover an area exhaustively. Instead it is to present the basic knowledge and skills required so that the students can continue educating themselves after leaving the classroom. We still need authors to write detailed treatises so that those individuals who wish to go to the library to continue their education in a specific area will have material to study. But we also need authors to do the very difficult job of preparing reasonable-length learning guides, which we call textbooks, for our students in class.
