General Biology I: Survey of Cellular Biology

Reviewed by Lynette Hauser, Professor of Biology, Tidewater Community College on 7/22/22

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

The text covers the material well and at an introductory level. The text does not include a glossary. There are learning objectives outlined at the start of each chapter as well as interactive practice questions for students to test their knowledge. I was surprised the book did not include information about chemistry or organic compounds. These ideas, at least on a basic level, seem essential to understand cell function, membrane transport, etc. There were also processes that could have added graphics, like facilitated diffusion and active transport.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

I did not find an errors or biased in the text. The information is accurate.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

As the textbook is written in very short sections it appears it would be easy to extract one section, update, and re-insert. The examples are relevant but don't appear to be dated.

Clarity rating: 5

Appropriate tone for an introductory textbook. Harder terms are defined/explained clearly and more complex ideas are simplified when possible.

Consistency rating: 5

The text is consistent in the presentation of ideas and concepts. The flow of the chapters is identical. Terminology is displayed consistently in bolded terms. Graphic text is also consistent, and citations are consistent.

Modularity rating: 4

The text has 56 different chapters each of which is a few pages in length. This does support the easily readable and divisible text objective of modularity but I thought there were too many divisions. It makes more sense to me to have few chapters with subsections, and that the subsections would renumber in each chapter, so chapter one, section 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and then Chapter two, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc. I think Part 8 chapter 53 is more confusing as a reader.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

Overall the order/organization of the topics makes sense and is clear and logical. I personally do not teach about phylogenetic trees until later in the semester and this text included it in one of the first sections as part of characteristics of life.

Interface rating: 4

When I downloaded the book as a PDF the interactive questions no longer functioned. However, there were links I could click on to take me to the web version of the text to use the practice questions. I experienced no navigation issues with the website or PDF version. The PDF text did have one very distorted image of the levels or organization that was challenging to read, it was blurry. Other images in the PDF text were clear.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

I did not find any grammatical errors.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The book is not culturally insensitive or offensive.