Week 5 - Checklist Evaluation by Patricia Byrd

Textbook Evaluation Checklist

Patricia Byrd and Marianne Celce-Murcia

Evaluation of the fit	Yes (a good fit)	Perhaps (an adequate fit)	Probably (a poor fit)	Absolutely not (wrong for curriculum, students, and/or teachers)
Fit between the textbook and the curriculum
Fits curriculum goals		/
Has appropriate linguistic content	/
Has appropriate thematic content	/
Fits the pedagogical and SLA philosophy of the program/course		/
Fit between the textbook and the students
Explanations understandable and useable for students	/
Examples understandable and useable for students	/
Activities appropriate for students	/
Thematic content understandable	/
Fit between the textbook and the teachers
Fits the language skills of our teachers	/
Fits the knowledge based of our teachers	/
Provides explanation that can be used by our teachers	/
Provides examples that can be used and expanded by our teachers	/
Fits the needs and preference	/
Provides in-book or instructor’s manual support for teachers	/
Overall evaluation of the fit of the book for this course in this program
Should the text be selected

In our opinion, this checklist, by Byrd, is not appropriate for an in-depth chapter/textbook evaluation. Looking at this the holistic view, we can see that this checklist seems to be a good evaluation at first but after viewing this checklist analytically, we deduced that this checklist is suitable for the overview of the textbook/chapter. In lay man’s term, this checklist just focuses on whether the textbook/chapter meets the need of the students, teachers and the curriculum, as a whole.

A full analysis of the textbook/chapter is hard to be done because the checklist is too simple and a bit vague. Furthermore, this checklist does not include the micro-evaluation stage that is crucial, even though it contains the macro-evaluation stage.

Our suggestions would be to use this checklist as the overview evaluation and then complemented by another checklist that involves a more in-depth evaluation. Then we can consider the evaluation is good.

Evaluation Questions:

1)   How it affects me?

First of all, I learned about the different types of checklist and their uses in developing materials. When I came across this checklist, I would eagerly suggest to use this as one of the evaluation methods for our future works. But, as I go in-depth and tried using the checklist to evaluate a chapter, it occurred to me that this checklist is complete and incomplete at the same time. What I meant was this checklist was good to evaluate a chapter holistically, but not analytically. Pairing with another checklist would be the best option to evaluate a chapter thoroughly.

2)   & 3) How does it affect my current level of knowledge and how can I use that knowledge to improve myself?

I now know that different researchers have their own opinions about materials evaluation. Thus, that is what differs their concepts and thus, different checklists were created. Now, I am not saying that some of the checklists are bad, but if they were accompanied by other checklists, the evaluation would be complete and authentic. Experimenting with checklists would be the best way to find out the best evaluation method.