Psychology Textbooks: Examining Their Accuracy

Abstract

Sales figures and recollections of psychologists indicate text-books play a central role in psychology students' education, yet instructors typically must select texts under time pressure and with incomplete information. Although selection aids are available, none adequately address the accuracy of texts. We describe a technique for sampling textbooks' content and evaluating accuracy. Preliminary studies indicated multiple errors in texts we examined. We present a proposed taxonomy of such errors. We speculate that errors are more likely when textbook authors use "deductive" rather than "inductive referencing," but acknowledge that authors frequently are under pressure to use the former. Discipline-wide efforts to assess textbooks' scholarly quality could facilitate improvements in accuracy, providing fundamental benefits to the discipline.Textbooks are of indisputable importance in training newcomers to the discipline and in giving psychology away to many students who take only one or a few psychology courses. Estimates place the size of the U.S. introductory psychology market for new and used textbooks at 1.2 to 1.6 million students per

Are we educating educators about academic integrity? A study of UK higher education textbooks

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“…Content analysis of textbooks has a long history, particularly in undergraduate psychology, (e.g. see (Steuer and Whitfield Ham 2008;Haselhuhn and Clopton 2008;Ferguson, Brown, and Torres 2016) although the field has extended across higher education e.g. see (Hopper and Huxford 2017;French et al 2015).…”

“…Many of these studies have focused on the accuracy of content within textbooks (e.g. (Steuer and Whitfield Ham 2008;Ferguson, Brown, and Torres 2016) while others have focused on determining how certain topics are covered across textbooks (e.g. see (Haselhuhn and Clopton 2008;Hopper and Huxford 2017) or on the relationship between textbook use and academic performance (Landrum, Gurung, and Spann 2012;French et al 2015).…”

Dying to Win? The Goldman Dilemma in Legend and Fact

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“…The same goes for Stam, Lubek, and Radtke's (1998) investigation of the particular view on the Milgram's experiments produced and ossified in social psychology textbooks. An even more popular genre of textbook research among psychologists is investigating their biases (Brown & Brown, 1982;Winegard, Winegard, & Deaner, 2014) or even just examining them for general inaccuracy and errors (Steuer & Ham, 2008). This, however, is more contributing to the image of the denigrated faulty textbooks and their flawed accounts of science (Morawski, 1992) than to textbook historiography.…”