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Biology
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Reviewer:
Doug Herman
Iowa City West High
Iowa City, IA
Textbook Name: Biology
Authors: Kenneth R. Miller and Joseph Levine
Copyright: 2002
Cost: $85.97
Publisher:
Pearson Prentice Hall
One Lake Street
Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458
201 236-7000
Publisher's Web site:
 Pearson Prentice Hall
Review: Known as the "Dragonfly Book" by most biology teachers who use it, this book has a wealth of sound biological information and its reading level seems adequate for both general biology and biology for the Pre-AP years. One of the strong points of this text is the wealth of ancillary materials available with it. The single most useful item for me so far has been the Resource Pro CD-ROM. It contains worksheets, reading guides, labs, teacher resources, and a test bank you can edit if you choose. All of these materials are also available boxed in print form. Another CD-ROM contains premade PowerPoint programs for each chapter, which you can edit to include your own slides. The Quick Labs capture student interest in the topics we are about to study and are very inexpensive to set up. The text does a wonderful job of introducing students to designing and carrying out experiments and analyzing data. I find the text consistently uses National Science Standards, and I can adapt our local district science standards. The teacher's edition is full of helpful information in its side margins and extended pages to assist teachers with how-to ideas for each topic. The practicum teachers I work with like the teacher's guide very much.
I don't really see any "downs" to the book. The Prentice Hall School Web site mentioned in each chapter is a very good way to keep student interest up, and it's very useful for teachers looking for additional resources. Probably one of the most useful Web sites is the one created by the authors (available below in "More..."). It is very student- and teacher-friendly, and I find it very useful even for my AP Biology course. My only criticism of this biology program is really more of a word of caution: it's a very full biology course. There might easily be a tendency for some teachers to try to do too much with all the chapters and materials that are available. I would encourage anyone to learn to use this wonderful program as a resource for setting up a general biology program or a course for the Pre-AP years. There is plenty of material here to hold the interest of any student and provide the necessary rigor for students looking for a more challenging course.
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