My memories of school textbooks are vague and not particularly happy. The only one of any note involves sitting in a history class copying out seemingly endless lists of information about the kings and queens of medieval England. Leaving aside the teaching methods, which obviously belong to that time, the book itself was a thick tome of dense text and badly drawn black-and-white sketches.

Needless to say, the textbooks of today are somewhat different (as, luckily, are the teaching methods in history). Now, the best textbooks are full of bright pictures, infographics, paragraphs broken up by bullet points, text boxes, tables, “did you knows” and interesting facts. They also invariably include a set of questions and activities at the end that will test all pupils on the interpretation of graphs, decision-making exercises and comprehension of the most important points of knowledge.

Yet, despite all the effort that publishers have put into designing modern textbooks that help teachers and serve the curriculum well, their use is in decline. Partly, of course, this is due to cost: with an average book now £20 or more, in these cash-strapped times, buying whole-class sets is a major outlay.

Quite apart from this, however, is the increasing belief that textbooks simply do not matter any more in a world where digital access is ubiquitous and the answer to any question can be found online.

It is time to make the case that the textbook is not yet dead, that it should be considered as an essential teachers’ tool, now and for ever. There is evidence (not all of it commissioned by publishing companies) that shows the benefits of a good textbook over other, cheaper, internet-based options.

Tim Oates (2014), group director at Cambridge Assessment, has detailed research showing an “anti-textbook” feeling in the UK, which is also shared by some other high-performing education systems around the world. Partly, this may be down to the growth of the digital age and the widespread belief in young people being “digital natives”.

All washed up?

Many people in education regard textbooks as obsolete because of the ease with which school pupils can access information online. Writing in The Atlantic, journalist Terrance F Ross (2015) recounts a conference of executives from the textbook industry, where the benefits of digital learning materials convinced them to abandon print media and “generic, stodgy textbooks” in favour of a wholesale online offering.

Public opinion may well be on their side. Parents are concerned about the effects on both physical and economic health - quite apart from the cost, who enjoys lugging glorified doorstops around on their back?

Oates talks about comments from Ofsted during school inspections in England, which were largely negative and often referred to teachers being “over-reliant” on textbook use. In one lesson observation by the Scottish inspectorate - admittedly, a number of years ago - a member of my staff was criticised for having pupils complete a textbook activity, even though it contained active learning and higher-order thinking skills.

Since that time, my experience has been of a subtle but definite decline in textbook use. Many a teacher has taken the negativity to heart and spent hours producing alternative worksheets. While more individualised, these basically repeat what is found in any good-quality textbook. When technology is supposed to save time for teachers, the irony is not hard to see.

There is research from around the world on how textbooks are used and why. In some high-performing countries, including Singapore and Finland, it is mandatory to use a state textbook to teach the national curriculum. In Singapore, textbooks are state-approved and all must meet set criteria, even when produced by a number of different publishers.

In some countries, the state textbooks are written exclusively by classroom teachers who possess the knowledge and skills that need to be taught, and they tailor the books accordingly. These books provide clear learning progression and focused assessments, but they also allow freedom for teachers to help pupils to apply what they are learning to real-life scenarios. In Hong Kong, for instance, this is explicitly encouraged and structured through textbook use.

There are reasons, of course, why the situation may be different in the UK and especially in Scotland. Here, Curriculum for Excellence means so much personalisation and choice for pupils in the “broad general education” of S1-3 that producing textbooks to cover all the possible topics in some subjects would be a very difficult task.

In the S4-6 senior phase, with much more prescription aimed at the final exams, there are a number of excellent books available across many different subjects. However, the multiple changes in Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) requirements over the past few years have meant that teachers (and, especially, their budget-holders) have been much more cautious about purchasing expensive resources that may have a limited shelf life. Publishing companies have endeavoured to counter this, though, by providing regularly updated online resources as part of the purchase price, which can be used alongside the printed word.

Write here, write now

So what are the advantages that textbooks have over online resources? As with most things educational, there is some research into the subject along with some ideas that are anecdotal or guided by gut feeling.

According to Oates, the structure of a textbook is important as a “physical manifestation of the education system and the structure of knowledge itself”. The books have a start and an end and are arranged around key themes. As summarised by Dan Rowson (2019), of the Royal Society of Biology, digital texts have a far less tangible structure, resulting in students finding it hard to construct a mental map of the subject. Textbooks follow a coherent pattern with progression through many stages that is not evident when accessing isolated pieces of relevant information on the internet.

Added to this, research by Patricia A Alexander and Lauren M Singer Trakhman (2017) has shown the disruptive effect that scrolling has on comprehension. Pupil reading was found to be significantly faster online than in print. And, perhaps unsurprisingly given the prevalence of digital media, pupils overwhelmingly preferred to read digitally and thought they learned more. However, when their comprehension was tested, it was significantly better for specific questions (as would be tested in SQA exams) when they had read printed rather than online texts.

When pupils were asked to relate the main ideas of the text, there was little difference. So it may be that, in certain circumstances, there isn’t much difference between the two media - more investigation needs to be done.

Although I have not seen any research on this, it seems fair to suggest that the scrolling effect could be exacerbated when pupils have to consult multiple sources in a text, such as tables and diagrams alongside the online word.

There are, of course, other reasons why we should want pupils to engage with textbooks. Although guidelines are constantly changing and open to debate, the American Academy of Pediatrics is one of several organisations that recommends children spend no more than two hours a day on digital devices. Any more could have detrimental effects on physical and mental health, it believes.

Using digital devices may have a negative effect on how children engage with handwritten work, with some reports showing that writing out notes from a textbook is far more beneficial than taking notes on a laptop.

As we move more and more towards providing one-to-one devices for children in schools, we need to ask if these resources may be causing harm as well as good in the longer term. And then, of course, there is the love of getting lost in a decent book. It may be that some of our children access books only in a classroom setting. So, arguably, the more we remove this opportunity, the more we are depriving them of the unique experience that comes from engaging with printed words and pictures.

The internet is a wonderful thing. So are the laptops, PCs, Chromebooks and smartphones that have enabled all the knowledge of the world to be easily accessible at our fingertips. They are, however, just some of the tools that we should be using in the classroom and they are complementary devices (rather than replacements) to a decent, well-thought-out and tested textbook.

One final point, if you still need to be convinced: thoughtless cutting and pasting is considerably more difficult from a textbook than it is from Wikipedia.

John Rutter is head at Inverness High School

This article originally appeared in the 4 October 2019 issue under the headline “The final chapter for textbooks?”