Textbook Panel Presentation — IAU Colloquium 105

Extract

You might be somewhat surprised by the presentations [as delivered] so far, in that there has been relatively little discussion of pedagogical matters (e.g., what should be the content of a text and what should be its order and manner of presentation). It seems that rather personal factors are in the foreground of everyone’s thinking. But I think that is probably inevitable, because the process of writing a textbook is not only a huge undertaking that comes to dominate the life of the author, but it is also an endeavor that places the author directly at the interface between the idealistic world of education and the very practical world of economics as dictated by the realities of the publishing markets. In addition, a textbook has a strong effect on an astronomy class. It has been suggested that an important reason why so many educational research studies fail to come to a definite conclusion is that the textbook is such a dominant influence that it swamps all the other factors!