I'm curious about people's experience when in their courses they ask which books students had used previous courses. I lab courses that I teach statistics is a pre-requisite and almost every time that I ask "which textbook did you use in statistics", I typically get responses like "it was a green book" or "is was an orange book". Since I also teach statistics and am familiar with a few stat textbooks and which ones other teachers use, I may ask "Gravetter and Wallnau" "7th edition" (greenish cover) or "6th edition" (orange cover). I have no idea what they're referring to when they say "red cover" or "blue cover" (no one has ever been clever enough to say a "grue or bleen cover").
This doesn't seem limited to statistics textbooks which one could argue that some "rerpession" mechanism is operating. ;-) Questions about authors of their intro psych, social psych, abnormal psych, etc., often are unproductive. Sometimes people can remember the author of supplementary texts such as books by Oliver Sacks but even here memory is not so good. So, the question is "Why can't students who spend about 15-16 weeks with a textbook, presumably reading it and taking notes, and preparing for exam on material therein, have such a hard time remembering who the author(s) of the textbook was?" I assume that someone somewhere has done a study of this and there may be significant differences between disciplines, such as Samuelson's Economics text and other "classic" textbooks in other areas are well known and majors in the field know the importance of that particular text (it is hard to say if there ever was a similar kind of text in psychology though the Hilgard and Atkinson intro psych texts may have once counted). Anyone know of such a study? -Mike Palij New York University [email protected] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=1586 or send a blank email to leave-1586-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
