About the Firm

Textbook Research Associates was founded in 1987 by a small group of editors and former instructors who had grown uneasy with a problem they kept meeting from opposite sides of the same desk. The editors knew their textbooks were slipping out of step with the trades they described. The instructors knew their graduates were arriving at work having learned procedures their employers no longer used. Neither group had a reliable way to find out, in writing, exactly where the gaps were.

We were established to be that reliable way. We are an independent research firm. We do not publish textbooks ourselves, we do not sell curriculum, and we hold no stake in any edition we examine. Our only product is documented testimony from people who do the work, prepared so that the people who write about the work can do so accurately.

What We Believe

Theory deserves better than to be outrun by practice.

A discipline's foundations rarely go out of date. Its practices go out of date constantly. Our work is not to challenge the theory in a textbook but to make sure the examples, procedures, tools, and standards wrapped around that theory still describe the world a graduate will actually enter.

How We Are Different

We talk to individuals, not panels. A practitioner speaking from twenty years on the job tells you more than a hundred checkbox surveys.
We document, we do not opine. Our reports record what practitioners said and how widely it holds. The editorial judgment stays with the publisher, where it belongs.
We are independent. Because we publish nothing and sell no competing material, our findings carry no agenda but accuracy.
We keep records. Every interview is sourced, dated, and retained, so a finding can be traced to the practitioner who supplied it.

The People We Speak With

Over the years our interviewers have sat with master electricians on job sites, charge nurses between shifts, court reporters in their offices, diesel mechanics in the bay, sommeliers in the cellar, surveyors in the field, dental hygienists between patients, and software administrators at their desks. The trades change; the principle does not. The person doing the work knows things the manuscript does not.

"Nobody had ever asked me how the job is really done. They asked the professors who used to do it. I have been doing it this whole time." -- Licensed practitioner interviewed for a skilled-trades revision, 2019

A Quiet Firm by Design

We have never advertised, and we do not intend to start. Our work comes to us through publishers and program directors who have seen our reports and asked for another. We consider that the only endorsement worth having. If you have arrived here, someone most likely sent you, and you are welcome.

Contact the research office »