In England, 10% of 10-year-olds receive textbooks; in south korea – 99%. In secondary science, 8% of students in England receive textbooks compared to 88% in South Korea and 92% in Taiwan.
Why don’t English schools use textbooks? cost is a factor, but just as important is the growing use of copied worksheets and handouts. worksheets have some advantages (tailor-made for the class, students must concentrate on that piece of paper) but some disadvantages (easily lost, rarely organized in the file). textbooks are disappearing because more materials are now available online. and the emphasis in some schools on differentiated learning has discouraged the notion of “one resource for all.”
You are reading: Text books not in school
The disappearance of textbooks is a downward spiral: if schools don’t buy textbooks, publishers can’t afford to produce them. In the past, a small number of outstanding teachers made a good living producing wonderful and engaging textbooks, and these people are now being lost to the system.
so what good are textbooks? textbooks are better than online resources or paper handouts in several ways:
1) are easier to cast (two minutes at the beginning of the year) and much easier to refer to (“let’s go back to page 45 we did last October”).
2) They are a big part of the solution for the child who joins a course late or misses a lot of work.
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3) They are a resource that parents can use to help their children.
4) The best textbooks contain exercises, questions, and worked examples, perfect for setting assignments and testing comprehension.
5) Especially for sixth graders, learning to take notes on texts is a vital skill they will need in college. With the advent of handouts, fewer and fewer students are learning to take notes.
6) Textbooks are much better for revision than handouts (many of which will have been lost).
7) Textbooks can be used for differentiated learning: all students use the same book but work at different rates.
8) The best textbooks, such as those used for mathematics in Singapore and Shanghai, guide the student and teacher through the syllabus extremely effectively. They save the teacher hours of lesson preparation time, as all the essential materials have been written for you by experienced teachers.
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9) Paper text is more effective for learning than screens: See Delgado, Vargas, Ackerman, and Salmeron Educational Research Review, September 2018: Don’t throw away your print books: A meta-analysis on the effect of media reading in reading comprehension. this review analyzed 54 studies with 171,000 participants and concluded that reading on paper allows better learning than digital text.
if you ask people over the age of 40 if they can remember the textbooks they used in school, the answer is usually “yes”. but more than the title of the book, they can remember individual pages and diagrams in the text. Will kids today be able to say the same about online screens?
The textbooks of the past had a great impact on education. they not only reflected the curricula of examination boards, but also influenced them. the best textbooks were the curriculum. determined the level at which the best students worked. Especially at the A level, the materials presented by examination boards do not specify exactly what a child should know: the level of detail and depth. it’s the textbooks that do that.
School libraries and school textbooks should be considered a vital resource in all schools. good books deepen, elaborate, and clarify what has been taught in schools. they lodge in your mind.
by professor barnaby lenon
dean of education, buckingham university
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