Carver, C. S. (2017). Marketing trends impede conceptual integration in psychology courses: Comment on Gurung et al., 2016. American Psychologist, 72, 176-177.

A recent AP article on teaching stressed the importance of fostering integration across topic areas. A current trend in publishing and marketing of textbooks is creating pressure that makes this goal harder to implement. The trend is offering custom tailoring of on-line texts by adopters, letting instructors assign some sections and make other sections unavailable to students. To permit this option, textbook publishers now insist that authors not cross-reference anywhere, so that no instructor will face the possibility of a student looking for material that has not been assigned and thus does not exist. Ironically, this pressure from publishers actively impedes conceptual integration in our textbooks

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