Almost any book one picks up in the field of education whether it is discussing high school administration or primary methods; rural school pedagogy or college teaching will make use of the term individual differences. It seems that Nature abhors duplicates, hence she makes none. Whether one considers the physical or mental side of children matters little since deviations above and below the average or mean will be found in either case.
But individual differences are not all confined to the field of education nor yet to the psychological testing field. Criminologists use individual differences in finger prints in hunting down law breakers, botanists find no two leaves are identical, and though a person watch the heavens for days he shall never be able to see two fleecy cloud masses that are exactly the same.
The purposes of this study are five in number:
- To make some objective comparisons between leading texts on the market.
- To discover what books are most widely used in the state of Colorado as well as throughout the United States.
- To get the personal opinions of teachers as to the merits of the books they are using.
- To make a comparison of each book with the mean and median of the group with regards to the percentage of the book devoted to each division of physics.
- To attempt if possible to find why some books are so widely used while others are not in vogue.
Barrett, Lawrence A., "A Comparative Study of Seven High School Physics Text Books" (1929). University Libraries Digitized Theses 189x-20xx. 190.