Message from the editor

Teaching Business & Economics, Summer 2009 by Wall, Nancy

This issue includes an extended feature on the new GCSE courses. We asked each awarding body to introduce their new courses. Their contributions highlight the distinctive features of the new approach. Particular aspects, such as controlled assessment, will receive more coverage in the next two issues of Teaching Business & Economics.

It has not been possible to get any new GCSE textbooks in time to review them for this issue. There will be a number to choose from and by the time you read this, publishers should have inspection copies available. It may be that the now common practice of linking books to individual courses reduces the element of choice in practice. Many awarding bodies will also offer teacher support including teaching resources.

The developing links between publishers and awarding bodies, and the awarding bodies' own provision of web- based resources, have implications. Your comments on this issue would be welcome. It would be good to devote the "thinking aloud" section of the September issue of Teaching Business & Economics to this and related issues. Critical commentary on where the most useful resources are to be found would be most welcome.

Another area of particular interest in this issue is the review section. My request for volunteers to review some new(ish) economics titles of general interest produced an enthusiastic response. We shall continue to review general interest economics books in future issues. It would be good to adopt a similar approach for business books.

Recently we have included star ratings in some book reviews. This was introduced in response to feedback from teachers. However, there have been some doubts about the usefulness of this approach because of the difficulty of defining exactly what qualities the star ratings imply and in achieving consistency between reviewers. Rating a textbook is not at all like rating, say, a washing machine. It necessarily is much less objective because individual teachers' expectations of a textbook differ greatly. There are other problems too: some reviewers don't like to approach their review in this way; others do, but their ratings appear rather idiosyncratic to the editors. For the time being we shall retain the option of using star ratings but only when the reviewer chooses this approach.

One theme in the next issue will be economic well being. Please get in touch if you have burning issues to discuss in this (or any other) area of interest.

We are looking to recruit new members for the TBE editorial panel. If you would like to be involved, please email me with as much detail as possible on your particular areas of interest.

Nancy Wall