A Study on the Influence Factors about Geography Textbook Selection by the Teachers in Senior High School

Textbook plays an important role in teaching process to teachers and without doubt, it is also an important learning guide to students. This study was conducted to assess the potential factors of selection that affect senior high school geography teacher selecting geography textbook. A questionnaire was used to collect information of teachers in senior high school. Questionnaire information, including their background, textbook being selected, and factors of selection were taken from 420 senior high school geography teachers whom selected by using stratified proportional sampling method. Factors of senior high school geography teacher background include: basic characteristics and type of the school. Factors regarding textbook being selected include: what kind of textbook was used and the process of textbook selection. The factors of selection textbook include: characteristics of textbook, characteristics of publishers, and decision-maker for selection. Above mentioned data were tested using the descriptive statistic, independent T-test and one-way ANOVA.
Major findings of this study are listed as below.
1. Geography teacher is the major decision-maker of the textbook selection.
2. About half of the geography teacher teaches geography depends on textbook, compared to self-edited lecture notes.
3. Among the geography textbook selection, characteristics of textbook is most important, , characteristics of publishers comes second, the key-person to decide and information correlated shows less important.
4. On the characteristics of textbook factor, grade of classes being taught is significantly different.
5. On the key-person to decide and information factor, teacher’s seniority, grade of classes, school’s type and school size shows significantly different.
6. On characteristics of publishers factor, teacher’s seniority shows significantly different.
Based on the findings above, several recommendations are proposed.