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Re: Review of Middle School Physical Science Texts (part 2)



While the review of MS texts did condemn all of the commercial MS texts, it
did mentions some material that could be used to supplement the texts. A
similar report by project2061 condemned all commercial texts, but mentioned
some non commercial material that was actually quite good. While blanket
condemnation my not be very constructive, sometimes that is the only
available response. There is one excellent book that the Hubisz report
failed to mention, Clement&Camp, "Preconception in mechanics". This may
have been omitted because it is currently hard to get.

Perhaps some available research based material can be adapted for MS& 9th
grade.

John M. Clement (No relation to John J Clement in the reference).



At 11:38 AM 2/24/01 -0600, Jack Uretsky wrote:
My experience is that talking to school board members about quality of
education issues is a total waste of time. School board members sign
checks put before them by administrators. They (the board members)
become unpopular when they ask questions.
Criticizing a teacher's textbook is tricky business, you are often
seen to be criticizing the teacher. The teacher, being a public
official,
is presumed by the public to be correct. Letters to your local
paper may,
just may, have some effect.

Let me add: From the keen-grasp-of-the-obvious department:

Unconstructive criticism is always unwelcome and almost-always
pointless. Saying book "A" is bad doesn't help, unless you can point to
book "B" which is clearly better.

Hubisz's report condemned all the books it reviewed. It did not rank them
in order of least evil, nor even draw any comparisons among them. It did
not judge them against any systematic criteria, so the reader cannot draw
comparisons with any confidence. I hope someone will conduct a
more-systematic investigation of this important area.