Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials

By prof. B.A Mey Reynolds Panton
e-mail: meymrlimon@gmail.com

The Florida Department of Education, who wrote Priorities for Evaluating Instructional Materials, said that teachers make a difference in students learning, but the materials used can support or impede that impact. Also, even if explicit instruction in thinking skills, combined with content is more easy to remember, and promotes intellectual and academic achievement; textbooks for social studies, math and science usually fail to include powerful instructional strategies to help students becoming strategic readers of content.

Special attention should be paid not only to the materials but also to the type of students. This means that students with a high special knowledge in a subject do not benefit from the same strategies that work for average students who possess a low expertise. On the other hand, there are students with a powerful resistance to learning, they require intense constructivism to break through their misconceptions.

Instructional materials must include features to maintain the learner motivation, such as: 

1. Positive Expectations:  Refers to the development of the right climate for learning, degree of challenge and the relevancy of the activities.
2. Feedback: Informative feedback about correctness, incorrectness, and how to improve what they are learning.
3. Appearance: Materials should have features that make them attractive or interesting.

Moreover, materials should teach important ideas, concepts or themes to help students understand what they are learning. containing clear explanations and directions and exclusion of ambiguity. Finally, instructional materials must include guidance and support to help students so they can be more independent learners and thinkers.

In my opinion, since there are different kinds of learners, teachers need to be very carefull when selecting materials. This means that they should not use the same material for all. Materials must be based on the student level of expertise, if they want to maintain students motivation. Also, it should be clear, relevant and challenge not too easy, not too hard to form critical thinkers.


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Principles of Effective Materials Development

By Prof. B.A.Mey Reynolds Panton

e-mail  meymrlimon@gmail.com

According to Brian Tomlinson, who wrote Principles of Effective Materials Development, teachers base their lessons on intuitions about what "works" and use the same materials for different groups. They assume that if something works  for one group it should work for the others. Tomlinson stated that materials should not be randon recreations from repertoire nor crafty clones of previously successful materials. Instead they should be coherent and principled applications of: theories of language acquisition and development, principles of teaching, our current knowledge of how the target language is actually used, and the results of systematic observation and evaluation of materials in use.

Tomlinson said that English Language Teaching materials should stimulate interaction, material should expose learners to language in authentic use, help learners to pay attention to features of authentic input, provide the learners with opportunities to use the targe language to achieve communicative purposes,provide opportunities fo outcome feedback, achieve impact, stimulate intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional involvement.

I agree with Tomlinson because teachers base their classes on experiences and intuition, if something works in one group, they take it to another one, and so on, taking for granted that it will works. It is important to remember we are not following a recipe, people have different learning styles so they can not assume that a specific material will work for everyone.

Teachers should be creative, starting from simple things for example writing sentences or questions on their own when designing a test instead of copying them from a book. This will help us grow not only as teachers but as learners, since we learn day by day.