Health & Disease

Times Educational Supplement (TES),
Reviewed by: Sophie Gower,
University of Worcester, 5 Jan, 2009

Part of the Biozone Modular Workbook series, Health & Disease looks at various areas of human health, illness and how medicine/treatment affects future and present health disorders.

Health and Disease reviewed by Sophie Gower,
Secondary Science PGCE student, University of Worcester

Having never studied human biology at A-level, I am not sure just how much detail a student of this age would need to know about health and disease. The Biozone modular workbook on Health and Disease provides a comprehensive guide on the topic at a level that I would consider to be of degree difficulty in places, but in an interesting and very visual way.

The book covers a wide range of issues, in great detail and using a lot of pictures and text to illustrate the ideas it is aiming to teach. However, if I were a student I think I may initially feel daunted by the amount of text each sheet contains and the size of the writing (it sounds pedantic, but it really is quite small). All of the pages, including the pictures are in black and white, presumably to save money, but a lot of the concepts would be infinitely better demonstrated using colour.

There are good points about this guide though that make it a resource that I would give my students to use. Each sheet can be removed from the book easily due to its perforated pages, meaning that a department would only need to keep one master copy to produce a wealth of resources for their students (though, note – the pages may not be photocopied). The writers state that this text aims to ‘span the gulf between text book and study guide’, something which I feel it succeeds at, providing information which is easier to digest than that of a text book, but in far more detail than is provided by revision guides which students cannot entirely rely on if they wish to attain the top grades.

Link to review: http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6006177