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Textbooks play a major and largely unexamined role in science education, particularly at introductory levels in college and high school. For the most part, textbooks are regarded as an essential component of such courses. While considerable effort is put by publishers and authors into improving textbooks, and by teachers into selecting among available published materials, less attention has been paid to broader considerations of the role that textbooks per se play in shaping the classroom environment.

Some years ago, out of what were then somewhat inchoate dissatisfactions with college science classes, I and several colleagues began experimenting with alternate ways to structure college science education, including downgrading the significance of and ultimately eliminating textbooks. In one such "non-traditional" course, I recently asked students to do some reading of relevant college science textbooks and write about their experiences with the textbook in comparison to those with the course itself. The student comments not only provide a window onto students' perceptions of and reactions to textbooks but suggest that textbooks are, in general, a significant influence on classroom environments and may not be an entirely positive way of engaging students at a deep level with biology, and science generally.

Biology 103 is a one semester introductory college biology course taught using selected web resources appropriate for each topic rather than a comprehensive textbook. The absence of a textbook derives from a decision made in an earlier course in 1993 (see Appendix 1 for rationale and history). Bio 103 is also a "non-traditional" science course in several additional respects, of which one is that students write publicly available web papers on topics of their choice in lieu of exams, and are encouraged in additional ways to "make sense of biology to yourself" (for some reactions to the course as a whole, see final entries in a course on-line forum). For these reasons, it attracts a variety of students, many of whom are not committed to careers that depend on biology coursework and some (but not all) of whom are uncomfortable with science in general. Because the course is taught at a women's college, the students are largely (though not typically entirely) female.

In the fall semester of 2006, students were asked to write commentaries on relevant books in biology, and encouraged particularly to read and comment on a college biology textbook of their choice, comparing what they got from it with what they got from other course-related materials and assignments.

Excerpts from the comments of all eight students (of a class of thirty-two) who chose to comment on a textbook (most often Campbell and Reece, Biology, 7th Edition, Pearson Benjamin Cummings, 2005) are provided here, along with links to the full texts of their comments when available.

The student comments documented here seem to me to be in and of themselves clear, cogent, and worth hearing by any educator thinking about how to improve science classrooms where textbooks play a significant role. They raise important questions about the tendency of science educators to give textbooks a central role in class planning and organization. And do so in a way that raises broader issues of pedagogical style and objectives. Obviously, though, the sample is a small one. Moreover, it is a sample of a distinctive group of students reacting in a distinctive context to, for the most part, one particular textbook. These methodological features need to be taken into account in any effort to go from the comments themselves to more general conclusions.

Methodological Issues

Only eight of the thirty-two students in the course chose to read and write about a textbook, and one might on this ground alone be concerned that the sample is not representative of even the Biology 103 class as a whole. On the other hand, the sample included students whose final grade spanned the range of final grades in the course, with perhaps some bias towards those whose work overall indicated the greatest engagement with the study of biology. Moreover, many additional students expressed general feelings about the classroom closely related to these eight students in on-line forum comments and anonymous student evaluations at the end of the course. My guess is that the students who didn't choose to read and write about a textbook would not have been substantially more positive about them than those who did; indeed, one might argue that the very fact they chose some other book reflects feelings about textbooks comparable to those of the students who did write about them (see also Appendix 2). In any case, consistent threads in the comments from students constituting a quarter of the class argue strongly that there is at least a significant population of students in this course who have similar negative feelings about textbooks and a similar coherent basis for those feelings.

Since most of the comments come from students who read and wrote about the same textbook, it is appropriate to wonder whether the criticisms are specific to that textbook. The textbook chosen by most students is generally regarded by most college faculty as among the best available, and is used in many high school classes as well. Moreover, many of the comments had to do with characteristics intrinsic to textbooks in general rather than specifics of particular textbooks (eg. "The material of the book is fixed.", "designed to give me a debriefing on what others have already observed", "would concentrate on memorizing various facts", "being in a class with videos and discussion and questions and tangents and people is better").

Additional issues that need to be considered before attempting to draw any general conclusions have to do with idiosyncracies of this particular class as a whole. In this connection, its noteworthy that the class was billed initially as "non-traditional", that it had relatively few students who regarded introductory biology as a required subject for future work, and that it consisted of a relatively small, entirely female group of students. In all these respects, the sample documented comes from a student population untypical of college biology (or science) classrooms in general.

Its quite clear from the documented comments themselves that "non-traditional" features of the course were on the minds of the students who read and wrote about their experiences with biology textbooks. Indeed, the assignment encouraged this by asking students specifically to "Give a synopsis of what you learned from the book; compare it to what you've learned in our course; use each to critique the other". The assignment was, however, the same whether students chose a textbook or some other book and, beyond a brief mention in the course syllabus about the desirability of supplementing course materials with "your choice of any college textbook in introductory biology", the subject of textbooks didn't come up either in the course or in conversations with individual students. In short, the students who wrote about them were, as asked, writing about textbooks against the background of experience in a course that didn't focus on them but not one that might any explicit arguments against them. Moreover, it is clear from both the general tone and many of the specifics in the documented comments that the critiques of textbooks reflected as much prior experiences with them as the particular context of this course. In short, the "non-traditional" context may have provided students an unusual opportunity to be critical of textbooks but it didn't mandate or direct such criticism, either generally or in specifics.

Would the spectrum of comments be different in classes of students who did not opt for a "non-traditional" course (perhaps because those who do have prior dissatisfactions with text-book based courses?), in classes including significant numbers of students for whom introductory biology was regarded as a pre-requisite for further coursework in biology, and/or in co-educational classes? My guess is that the answer in all cases is yes, if for no other reason than students are heterogenous and the more differences there are among students in a given class, the greater the range of perspectives that will be expressed. Beyond this, though, it is certainly my experience (which I'm sure is not unique to me) that some students prefer to know what they are supposed to learn from a course, and that textbooks are for this reason, at least, appealing to some students.

The question, then, is not whether the comments documented here are representative of all students reacting to all textbooks in all contexts but rather whether the critique of textbooks and textbook usage reflected in this particular sample has relevance beyond the particular circumstances in which the comments were generated. While sub-populations may reflect perspectives unique to those sub-populations, they may also serve to call attention to perspectives that are more widely relevant but more difficult to detect in larger populations (the canary in the mine shaft phenomenon). Some suggestion that this is so in the present case comes from comments like "all of this information condensed so tightly comes at the expense of readability ... it becomes dry very quickly", "there didn't seem to be any particular order or relevance of the sequence in which his observations were presented", "99% of the book ... primarily consists of lists of facts to memorize and explanations of why those statements are true", "I began to get hindered by the overly technical terms and overcomplicated concepts." These sorts of comments are, in my experience, heard from a wide range of students in a wide variety of different classroom contexts, and represent the feelings of many faculty as well, spoken or unspoken. They are usually dismissed as flaws of particular textbooks or accepted as an inevitability of science education. Perhaps though if everyone detects, to some degree, the same odor, there is, for all or most people, a similar problem, one to which a particular sub-population is particularly sensitive and hence can help to identify?

Diagnosing the Problem

Biology, like all science, is a continually evolving set of observations and of interpretations of those observations in terms that reflect both a continually evolving professional set of standards and a continually evolving wider social and cultural context. Biology has, since the middle part of the last century, been evolving at a particularly rapid rate (over somewhat different time courses, recent rapid evolution has been true of the sciences in general). When the rate of change of biology (or any other science) is slow, it is in principle possible to create a coherent snapshot of the field, a textbook that "seeks to present a sum of observations collected ... and the most widely accepted stories explaining those observations". When, as at present, the rate of change is very fast, it is inevitable that such a snapshot lacks coherence and that the effort to be comprehensive results in readers feeling discouraged by "the amount of information to learn" and "overly technical terms". One can't but sympathize with the authors and publishers of textbooks wrestling with the incompatible challenges of comprehensiveness and readability (while at the same time recognizing that they are in many cases well paid for their efforts).

What is more important in the present context than the conflict between comprehensiveness and readability is the consequences of efforts to deal with that conflict for students' understanding not only of the real business of science education but that of science itself: "it is a more efficient use of paper to simply say "this is a fact" rather than "we think things might work a bit like this ... The textbook was not designed to teach me how science works and what I can contribute to it; it was designed to give me a debriefing of what others have already observed and postulated". Yes, textbooks may (increasingly) say that "science is neither dogma nor an assemblage of immutable facts ... it is an ongoing process", but inevitably "99% of the book presents a different view on science ... The general tone of the book is that of a dogmatic text". In the context of courses that use textbooks as a major point of organization, its little wonder that many students insist on asking "what am I supposed to know?" and that large numbers of people, having been through such courses, regard science (happily or unhappily) as a form of dogma.

Textbook as dogma is a problem not only in that it inevitably and seriously misrepresents the fundamental fluidity of science but also, and perhaps even more seriously, because it encourages students to regard themselves as consumers rather than as producers: "it perpetuates the view that students can have no impact since so many scientific "truths" have already been exposed". "Biology 103 taught me how to think, while Biology simply told me what to think" - something that is, I believe, less useful both scientifically and generally".

The difference between a classroom environment that, however unintentionally, makes "what to think" more important than thinking oneself is not just a matter of courtesy or good fellowship, as recognized by the student just quoted. Without a textbook, "the class fostered individual expression and ideas and instead of responding to a text we were responding to each other ... I gained a better appreciation of the implications of science in my everyday life than I otherwise would have." "Generally, Biology takes a linear science path, unlike the class which prefers a "seriously loopy" method. This difference takes the class to places that the book does not ... discussions and questions and tangents and people is better". "Biology 103 showed me that biology was the science of life, the science of my life." "The class allowed the students to explore what we did not know, but it also forced us to rethink what we have always believed to be true, because it was stated in a textbook." "as a student who has been turned off by science in the past, I think addressing science as a dynamic process is liberating ... we were able to cover the basic concepts of biology while still making it exciting because every conclusion we came to was our own."

Organizing a course with a textbook at its core contributes to creating an atmosphere of dogmatism in a classroom. Without a textbook, students can become freer to engage themselves, each other, and the teacher collectively in the process of developing new understandings. In so doing, they may learn (temporarily, at least) less of the specifics of science as it is represented in comprehensive textbooks, but they can gain a greater working mastery of the useful insights of a field and of how science itself works and what it means, to themselves and others.

Conclusions, Reservations, Extensions

The principle conclusion that I believe is justified by the observations reported here is that it is not only possible, in at least some contexts, to teach introductory biology without the use of a textbook but that there may well be definite advantages in doing so. These include not only greater and more enthusiastic engagement of students with the material of the course and with science itself but also (for me at least) a classroom that remains year after year "fresh and interesting" for the teacher as well. A "flexible" class agenda allows the teacher to anticipate new insights for themselves from each year's course "as it grew and evolved" just as the students can (or should), and, in so doing, to participate actively in the ongoing evolution of the science of biology.

The observations reported here also suggest strongly that focusing courses around a textbook contributes substantially to a "dogmatic" classroom atmosphere, one in which students are encouraged (or allowed) to adopt a passive consumer orientation towards a course and hence towards science generally. Sampling limitations are clearly relevant here, and so it would be desirable to have additional observations on this point from students in other contexts. Familiar anecdotal evidence ("will chapter 3 be on the exam"? "I don't need this course because I took one in high school that used the same textbook") suggests that the problem is a common one. At the same time, it is certainly possible that some students in some contexts make productive use of a textbook without treating it as dogma. What needs further exploration is how student attitudes towards textbooks vary among students and among classes, and how much this influences classroom atmospheres in various teaching contexts.

This in turn raises a key issue. "Teaching contexts" vary not only in student populations and forms of pedagogy but also in objectives. Providing students "an introduction to biology" is, in this respect, too general a characterization to be useful and needs greater specificity. If the overriding objective of a course is, for any of a number of reasons, to assure that students achieve mastery of a fixed and well-defined body of understandings of biology (eg "looking for introductory knowledge to advance to the next level"), then the issue of whether the use of a textbook contributes to a more dogmatic classroom atmosphere may be irrelevant. It becomes more and more relevant to the extent that an additional, or principle, objective of of the course is to engage students with the ongoing development of understandings in biology (or any other science). In this case, the positive features of the use of a textbook need to be appropriately weighed against whatever contribution it makes to creating a dogmatic classroom environment ("The material and direction of the book is fixed").

Among the positive features of textbooks, even in the context of a pedagogical commitment to conveying science as interactive process rather than dogma, is the convenience, for both teachers and students, of a common body of background information and illustrations, and of having one informed way of making sense of it all, including material that may not be previously familiar to the teacher. These advantages are particularly important for teachers handling material with which they have less sophistication. In this regard, it is worth stressing that the arguments made here relate not to the potential value of a textbook for the teacher but rather to the message conveyed by teachers to students about the place of the textbook in the overall context of the course. One can make use of a textbook oneself, and make it available to students as ONE perspective on that material, without encouraging or allowing students to believe that the material of the textbook defines either the course or the field of study itself. The key here is to avoid structuring the course around the textbook and mastery of it, to treat it instead as one of a number of available resources with explicit additional attention to the fluidity of the field and the need for students to engage themselves in making sense of it.

My principle concern in this article is to assert neither that the use of a textbook in introductory biology (or other science) courses should in all cases be abandoned, nor to contend that the abandonment of textbooks would, in and of itself, assure more effective science education. Neither conclusion is justifiable by the observations presented here, and my own more general experiences are that there are various ways to use textbooks effectively in different teaching contexts. Moreover, the elimination is textbooks is not, in and of itself, adequate to assure a non-dogmatic classroom environment. Additional changes (as, for example, in approaches to examination and grading) are needed as well to move effectively in that direction.

What I do hope this paper and the observations reported here succeed in doing is to raise questions in the minds of colleagues teaching introductory college (and high school) science courses that might not otherwise have occurred to them, about the use of textbooks in such courses, the objectives of such courses, and the relations between the two. In my own case, the experiment of downgrading the significance of textbooks led me ultimately to a whole new way of thinking about the needs of the diverse population of students who take introductory science courses and ways to meet those needs. If the observations reported here encouraged others to undertake their own explorations along these sorts of paths, this paper will have served its primary function.