High School Chemistry Textbook

You can preview most of our K12 textbooks at Kendall Hunt Publishing Company's website.

In the previous article, I spoke about the beginning stages of creating a high school science textbook: acquisition and planning, as well as the development of the manuscript and art package. In this article, I'll introduce the design process that we, as an educational publishing company, use.

Around the same time that the copy-editing is being done, we coordinate with a designer to develop the cover image/design. When selecting a cover image for a high school biology textbook, high school chemistry textbook, or any of our textbooks, we look for a good balance of gender and ethnicity in an photos of people that we use. We also consider age-appropriateness for grade-level, whether it’s a primary school textbook vs. secondary school textbooks and whether it’s a product targeted to a specific ability, such as a curriculum for high ability learners.

The cover image needs to be strong and eye-catching and express the concept that we are trying to project for our target market. We want to draw the student into the content. The text/logo-type needs to be nicely balanced and eye-catching as well. We usually request 3-4 choices and may go through several "proofs" to complete the front/spine/back panels of the cover. The text on the back cover is another tool used to interest and draw students into the content. The saying, "you can't judge a book by its cover" is certainly true, however, we need to show something dynamic in order to have potential customers review our products in the first place!

This weekend I was speaking with a friend of mine who is a high school science teacher and we were talking about high school science textbooks. She was bemoaning the lack of teacher resources in the high school biology textbook her school uses. Sure, she has the teacher edition textbooks that go with the program, but she’s looking for something more. At the private school where she teaches, they’ve been using the program for a number of years and are hoping to change soon. 

She had no idea the inquiry based science resources that are available online now. When I told her about the virtual autopsies that are available with our Forensic Science for High School program, she was so excited. That got me thinking, are you happy with the resources that school textbook publishers are providing for you as teachers? Does your high school physics textbook give you online resources for experiments & interactive learning exercises? Is your high school chemistry textbook robust enough to keep your students engaged? I’d love to have a conversation about this!
 

Were you good at science? I loved science, and did fine in biology, but chemistry and physics? Not so much. I was having this conversation with a colleague last week and we were discussing the fact that at the time, most of our learning came from our high school biology textbook, our high school chemistry textbook, our high school physics textbook or some other high school science textbook. In biology, at least we got to dissect actual (formerly) living things, maybe that’s why it sunk in so much easier for me.
 

This led to a discussion about how lucky our kids are now to have so much available to them in the world of inquiry based science. Educational textbook publishers, like Kendall Hunt, well, we’re not just school textbook publishers anymore. Take, for instance, our Forensic Science for High School program. Yes, there is a book, but there’s also an interactive website with the new edition that will have virtual autopsies and other interactive investigations. Another of our programs, Nano Legends, is a video game in which students learn cellular biology by helping a nano-adventurer kill a cancer cell! There was a great article about learning through video games in the NY Daily News a couple months ago. You can read it here.
 

Learning science through video games…even I might have pulled an A out of Chemistry that way!