My focus was on the details of how topics were presented. I looked for unclear or misleading wording, poor examples and problems. The attempt was to get a sense of how diligent the authors and editors were in creating these texts.
Overall, I found the Houghton Mifflin Text to be the best of the three. The presentation is very clear, and the problems seemed well designed to guide the student to an understanding of each topic.
The McGraw Hill Text was also good. But is in need of a fair amount of editing.
The Scott Forseman-Addison Wesley text has some more serious problems. The presentation was cluttered by all sorts of cartoon characters and sidebars that would only serve to distract the student.
All three book contain references to their web sites. I did not review these in any detail, but noticed that the Houghton Mifflin site did not contain any pointers to sponsored (commercial) links. It also had practice problems that could done and checked online. Commercials on web sites only serve to slow down the site and increase the students distraction level. The Addison Wesley site was the worst in this regard; while some of the links were to government sites like NASA, others were to USA Today, etc. The McGraw Hill site had links to commercial "Education" sites. But these were only first impressions. The sites are probably well known to the teachers who are free to chose sites independent of which text is bought.
Another minus for both Addison Wesley and McGraw-Hill was the inclusion of software-specific examples; brief tutorials that showed the student how to plot data with a particular software package (theirs?). Students time would be better spent plotting data by hand.
None of the texts did a very good job at distinguishing a line plot from a line graph. There were some missed opportunities to put these two very similar terms side by side. I would actually prefer that the term line plot not be used at all, and to consider a line plot to be a special case of a histogram. (What is the Regents requirement?) This would eliminate the confusion in terms altogether. (Addison Wesley does not discuss histograms at all, however).
The workbooks all seemed reasonable, but some comments are given below. Notably, the McGraw-Hill workbook has a problem that cannot be solved correctly.
Regards, and best of luck
John Sikora (Parent)
Cortland, NY
Last update April 4, 2001