TEXTBOOK EVALUATION

MATHEMATICS FORM 1 (VOLUME 2)
CHEANG CHOOI YOONG
ARUS INTELEK SDN BHD

There are some important and very specific factors to publish and to write a very useful and beneficial textbook for students. For example, the contents must be interesting and understandable instead of becoming far too complicated and difficult to understand. Students in primary and secondary schools find it is hard for them to learn from the textbook, which is unattractive and too details of information. The best way of publishing a textbook is simple and compact information. Not too details and too crowded. One of the textbook that are been using by students in Malaysian school is MATHEMATICS FORM 1(VOLUME 2) published by ARUS INTELEK SDN BHD written by CHEANG CHOOI YOONG. There are various aspects of evaluating the textbook starts from the organization, content and the physical aspects of the textbook.

ORGANIZATION

Overall, this textbook is well organized as it provides useful table of contents, glossary and index. These are important to give students some references about the contents come from. The table of contents is able to show logical arrangement and development of the subject to help students understand the contents systematically. The introductions and summaries in each chapter are clear, simple and comprehensive to make students understand the topic better. Besides, all the pages are numbered and easily to find.

CONTENTS

The content meets the local and national standards that enable students for form 1 to use this textbook and it is suitable enough to be the main book in schools. Since this textbook was published on 2002, we can say that the content is accurate and up to date as its references was from the other resources in the year 2000 until 2002. However, there is one weakness in this textbook because other resources must support it. Students may find some parts or topics which are more difficult to understand for instance in the ‘Algebraic Expressions’ that needs deeper understanding. Besides, some words and the language are sometimes hard to understand for form 1 students. Nevertheless, since there is a small section in each chapter to introduce the mathematical words and meaning, students are able to make use of those words. In fact, the language is grammatically correct and contains age appropriate reading levels, which is suitable for form 1 students. Practice makes perfect, so as well as mathematics, do lots of exercises and questions makes them understand the topics deeper and get the knowledge. Therefore, to improve the students learning, this textbook provides questions at every end of the lesson. Not only has that, these questions enabled students for being exposed to examination questions. However, providing good questions was not enough for students learning. This textbook is lacking in providing some creative activities related to the chapters. Students may find its boring to have just learned without any activities that can encourage higher-level thinking. Besides, students need something different rather than only calculations and theories all the time. Overall, this textbook is good and could be used for several years depending on the students’ achievement.

PHYSICAL ASPECTS

From the physical aspects, there should be no problem as the size and the weight of this textbook appropriate for the students. This book is not too thick and can be carried to schools. The reason of separating some contents into volume 1 and volume 2 is to reduce students’ burden of carrying heavy and thick books to school. The font is clear but maybe too pack as students may get confused of the lines when reading some statements. The binding, pages and cover is durable and not too complicated which is suitable for young students. Instead of those aspects, the important parts in this textbook are the illustrations, tables, figures, graphs, charts and others. Technically there are a lot of interesting pictures and graphics but displaying pictures too much just making the pages very crowded and messy. Besides, some illustrations are irrelevant and not clear. To be better, every pictures must have little explanations of what the thing is and some descriptions about it. Now then, the students can recognize the thing and what it is used for. Additionally, this textbook feature can be more interesting if the background colors are varies, not only using grey and blue color. Colors may help students’ learning to be much better and increase their interest of using this textbook.

CONCLUSION

As conclusion, this textbook is good enough to be used in schools. The most important thing in one book is the organization and the content of the book itself. However, the appearance of the book also helps the students to understand the knowledge. These three aspects are important to produce a textbook that being used in our education system as well as to play the main role in delivering the knowledge about the subject.