A Query on the Components and Aspects of Critical Assessment of Academic Textbooks with an Emphasis on the Principles of Planning and Organizing Educational Messages

Textbooks have different features and dimensions that reviewing their quality requires study, criticism and evaluation from different perspectives. Therefore, this study aimed to provide some criteria for critical assessment of academic textbooks based on principles of educational messages. This is a qualitative library research in which the scientific resources such as books and articles have been studied inductively, and then, the topics were categorized and new criteria for critical assessment of textbooks presented. The research population of this study include all information resources, books, and indexed articles in the accredited domestic and foreign journals which published through 2001 to 2017. Moreover, the sampling method of this research is purposive non-random sampling. The results indicated that in the criticism of academic textbooks, other than regarding the formal, structural, content, and writing dimensions, there also exist two more dimensions of a high importance, i.e., the educational and research dimensions. Finally, it can be concluded that in the criticism of academic textbooks, in which the first purpose is the transmission of an educational message, if the educational and research dimensions ignored, the critique of the book would stay inapplicable and would not satisfy its goals.