Textbook, Anyone?
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- The 25 students in Professor Richard Olivo's neurophysiology course
last spring made a few extra dollars as textbook reviewers in addition
to earning their grades.
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- Olivo gave each of his undergraduate students her share of an honorarium
paid by the publisher for a review of Essentials of Neural Science and
Behavior. The project began partly because the book's author, Eric Kandel
of Columbia University, and the publisher, Appleton & Lange, already
knew Olivo's opinion of the medical school version of the text from a review
he wrote for Science magazine.
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- One of Olivo's criticisms of the medical text, whose size he likened
to "a coffee table," is that it "tends to present information
as if it came down from stone tablets." Olivo also notes that the
book got bigger and bigger with each addition. So when the publisher came
out with an undergraduate version of the volume and invited him to suggest
revisions, Olivo says he decided-with the publisher's permission-to ask
the students if they'd like to help with the job.
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- "It's important for students to have a sense of the play of ideas,"
he says. "In recent years I've been very interested in having students
be the experts sometimes in a course. So here we have an example where
the students were given the opportunity to be the experts on the utility
of the book. I invited them to think seriously about what a book should
be."
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- So each week over the course of the semester, students e-mailed critiques
of the assigned chapters to Olivo, who forwarded them to two students selected
on a rotating basis to write synopses of the class's views. "Critiques
were not graded, but synopses were," he says.
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- "The critiques were very thorough," Olivo notes. "The
students took this job very seriously. They thought their opinions could
shape a book that would be used by other students in the future."
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- Students were able to spot undefined terms and confusing figures, and
they conveyed that information to the publisher in a 54-page review with
a preface by Olivo.
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- The students each received a $20 honorarium from the textbook's publisher.
Olivo insists that, for the amount of work his students did on the book,
Appleton & Lange got a bargain.-WS
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