A Study of the Role of Graphic in Designing and Preparing University Textbooks

Textbooks, one of the most popular forms of instructional media, are used to teachstudents at the most levels and in the most subject areas. The purpose of thisresearch is to evaluate the role of graphic in designing and preparing universitytextbooks in order to present an applied model. This study also involvesconsideration of the effect of the demographical variables (gender, age, academicfield, academic terms and Average) in student's viewpoint to examine graphicaldesign of university textbooks. A descriptive method and a visual content analysiswere performed in this research. Therefore, in this study two statistical procedureswere conducted. The first procedure includes an evaluation of graphical designs ofthe university textbooks by 267 students from psychology and educational sciencefaculty of Tarbiat Moalem University. The second procedure includes the visualcontent analysis of 40 books on behavioral and educational Science areas publishedby international publishers such as: John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Rutledge andSAGE. The information gathering tools were a graphical design questionnaires and achecklist. The questionnaire was implemented and all the data were analyzed andalpha coefficient was computed. The reliability coefficients obtained were: 0.60 forCover Design Factor, 0.82 for Text Design Factor, 0.83 for Picture And TableDesign Factor, 0.88 for Photography and Portrait Design Factor and 0/74 for PageDesign Factor. The analysis of data was performed at two levels: the first levelinvolved the descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentage, mean and standarddeviation. The second level involved the inferential statistics including One SampleT Test, Friedman test and Chi-Square test. The result of the first study showed thatstudent's viewpoint of graphical designs of textbooks was significantly below theaverage level considered for the study (p≤0.01). Moreover demographic variablessuch as gender, age, academic field, academic terms and Average of the studentswere significantly influential on their evaluation of graphical designs of universitytextbooks (p≤0.05). The visual design examination of the foreign textbooks showedthat in graphical designing of the textbooks a plethora of principles and factorsshould be considered.