Development of Tool for the Evaluation of a Textbook

Abstract

This paper reflects on the process of evaluation of a quality textbook along with the development of a tool for the same. Textbook preparation and its evaluation are difficult tasks which takes a lot of time, efforts, and wholehearted commitment of the working team. There is a dire need of the evaluation of textbooks according to the present needs of the society as well as updating due to changes in the current scenario of the technological advancements. The main objective of the present paper was to develop a tool to evaluate the textbook. For this, the investigators organised three workshops in three phases with the users, publishers, method masters/teacher educators and authors in the specific field of school education. In the first workshop brainstorming focussed on the various dimensions of textbook evaluation, subsequent workshop items on various dimensions were framed. These developed items for evaluation tool were mostly open ended. The items/questions on these five dimensions were collected and shuffled to have a draft of the evaluation tool. This draft was presented before the vetting experts identified by the investigators. The items selected in the tool were easily understandable to all concerned stakeholders and finally linguistic experts edited it so that it may be utilized for the purpose.