I will have a draft of a new textbook ready for the fall semester. It is an engineering class.
I very much want feedback from the students concerning the quality and usefulness of the material.
What are the best practices for getting this feedback from students? Is it ethical to give a grade (or extra credit at least) based on students' feedback?
In practice, you will receive great feedback from a very small proportion of the students (and this subset will consist almost entirely of students who will do well on the course regardless). But even the weakest students can and will make perspicuous observations, or point out gaps in your explanations, that will be helpful. And then many students will be hard-pressed to contribute anything.
If any credit at all is traded for feedback, you actually raise the threshold for students who are aware they are not among the top and hence afraid of saying something dumb. The "swots" might go into overdrive, which generally produces lots of great feedback, but you feel you are abusing the time and kindness. The majority who has no substantial thing to contribute might feel compelled to manufacture something.
The "extra" idea does not mitigate against the latter problem, since students will evaluate every bit of possible credit in terms of the relative effort. Any carrot being dangled is far play.
So: my answer based on experience over several books and years of teaching: do not skew or degrade the feedback you could be garnering with any of these extra credit arrangements (quite aside from ethics which has been well addressed in the other answers). Use the book-in-progress as lecture notes, make it very clear that you are aware it is still teeming with mistakes, and that any and all comments are hugely appreciated.
At the end, you will know the main feedback contributors by name. They will come to you for recommendation letters, career advice, and so on. And then you will be able to reward their kindness in kind. Such is not a bribe; the praises you have to sing about such a student are genuine!
Is it ethical to give a grade (or extra credit) based on student feedback?
I think the key question is, will reading draft material from your textbook help students towards their understanding of the subject of this class?
If yes, then it honestly sounds like a great exercise to me. Not only does it force the students to actually read some material related to the class (albeit in an unpolished draft form), it also could allow them to "check" their understanding by comparing the draft with the material they are already familiar with. Some suggestions:
It seems best if they are asked to read material that you have already covered in class and that there are other sources on; that way they are not just completely lost, but they have something to compare to and a way to reliably detect errors.
If this is part of the grade (extra credit or otherwise), I think it should be mainly based on completion, not on how many errors and typos they find. You could also ask them to write a "summary" of the chapter to check their understanding and thoroughness.
If no, then it is unethical. Your job as a teacher is to help the students learn the material, and using them as free labor to proofread your book is inappropriate.
This could be the case, for example, if the book is not exactly on the subject of the material that the class is covering, or if it is in such an unpolished form that it is difficult to get anything out of while still a student, and not an expert on the material.
It is ethical to ask students to proofread a textbook. It isn't (generally) ethical to grade students based upon their feedback having proofread (unless their is an agreed-upon educational basis).
Some students will read the draft of your textbook, especially if it is required reading. You can ask students that do read your book to provide feedback and you can offer to include any students that do with an acknowledgement.
I have done this in one course (letting students proofread my lecture notes for extra credit) and might be doing it a few more times. A few caveats:
Keep the stakes low. This should be extra credit that can take an A- to an A, not a source of points that lets students max out their grade without writing exams. There are several ways to do this: You can make each correction worth very little, or you can cap the correction points per student, or you can let correction points peter out (e.g., the n-th correction a student finds is only worth 1/sqrt(n) points or so). I don't know what the best option is. Moreover, there should be a way to get the maximum grade without reporting errors. Rationale: There is generally a certain type of student that tends to find a lot of mistakes, while others just don't see them, either subconsciously correcting them in their mind or focusing on the "big picture" and reconstructing the details on their own. All else being equal, error spotting probably correlates positively with scientific success, but all else is not usually equal, so it is not a great measure of ability. Moreover, if you value corrections too highly, students will get too defensive about bad corrections for the sake of grade optimization.
Make sure you aren't only rewarding the "fastest gun in the west". Let students know they can still get points for correcting slightly outdated versions in reasonable time.
Prepare a few canned "thanks, but that's not what I'm looking for" responses for students "correcting" what are actually matters of style. In case of doubt, give out points, even if you don't correct.
Prepare a comfortable way to keep track of what student has received how many points. A specific tag in your mailbox is one option, but there are probably better ones around.
Including the model solutions in the "bug bounty" (i.e., giving extra credits for mistakes found in them as well) is probably a good motivator to make students read model solutions, which may improve their later homework quality.
As my lecture notes are open content and closely relevant to the class material, I have never found any conflict of interest in rewarding students for improving them. If the notes were to become a commercial textbook, I'd be a bit more conflicted, although I'd still say it is on the ethical side, if the students get to keep the notes. If the notes were unrelated to the class material, I honestly don't know; as a student I would find such a grading scheme somewhat bewildering.
It is ethically fraught in any case. It can be perceived as a bribe by some. It can be perceived as a requirement by some students that asks them to go beyond learning and demonstrating their learning.
Certainly you can ask students to proof your text books and you can solicit their opinions. I would do the latter anonymously, however. You will get better and more honest replies. You can still give an acknowledgement to the class, if not to individuals.
It is fairly common to pay grad students to do this sort of thing and to ask them to write exercises. But there are no grades involved.
My suggestion is to make it a side transaction, fueled by money, not by grades.
Proof reading is work. Pay them.
It's probably worth checking with your faculty if they have arrangements with any proofreading services for publications since these will already exist. If you want to reward students with work experience in academia then you should request a casual work contract that is managed by your institution's HR department (never engage in a contract by yourself). Though, it is still an iffy question ethically, particularly where this might take work away from professionals.
In grad school I took a class where we test-drove a textbook draft (not the professor's, but a colleague's). We used a tool where the PDF was available online and students could highlight parts of the text and post comments or questions or feedback about it. Everyone could see and respond to each other's comments, including the textbook author and the professor.
I don't remember exactly, but I think students were required to participate by posting regularly on each week's assigned chapter, and constructive feedback was requested, but it was pretty much just a participation/effort grade. Comments didn't have to be feedback or constructive to get full points.
I don't know if this kind of approach would work for you, but I think it was very effective for students and the book's author and I feel there were no ethical issues with this setup.
One textbook we used was created, chapter by chapter with all the examples over several semesters at one university.
The author expressed his thanks to the students in the preface...
I would hand out a draft of the book to the students (or the relevant parts only) and award bonus points towards the final grade for every valuable suggestions that helps to improve the manuscript. I did this several times already and the students appreciated this. Probably relevant: I used the bonus points only for a "pass of fail" grade, so the students could look for improvements to make up for fails in the homework assigments but not to improve a final grade.
To make sure that you only count every suggestions once, you can use a forum to collect them. I do this will all my teaching material for some years and it really helps.
A long time ago, one of my professors used lecture notes that were intended to become a textbook. He offered a bottle of champagne to the student or team who reported the most errors in the manuscript.
This clearly removed the issue of a grades-for-services trade, and still encouraged us to spot and report errors. The bottle was good enough to try for, yet cheap enough that it wouldn't bother the tax authorities.
No. We were required to buy a draft release of a new text book, written by the professor. Corrections were handed out on photocopies. The typsetting was bad. The binding was poor. The book was $250 back in 1997.
And we didn't get a 'new' copy with all of the fixes.
Just remembering this event... and we (as students) all made fun of the situation and how ridiculous it was as a requirement for the course.
It's your book. You are the one who should proofread it, not anybody else. You should take sole responsibility for it, but also, you should then receive sole credit for it.
