Textbook Use and Learning: A North American Perspective

Abstract

Eight hundred and ninety students at 35 US institutions of higher education participated in a comprehensive study of textbook use and its relation to ratings of textbook quality and helpfulness, a student self-report of learning, student self-report of their deep approach to learning, student perceptions of instructors, and a measure of quiz performance. Intercorrelations between key measures revealed surprising relationships about the influence of these variables on self-reported learning and quiz performance. An analysis of textbook differences revealed some significant differences between the books in terms of quality and helpfulness as well as self-reported learning, but not on quiz performance. The authors identified significant predictors of self-reported learning (deep approach and student perceptions of instructor) and quiz performance (grade point average and textbook helpfulness). These results highlight the complexity of examining student learning and suggest some important variables and problems for future research especially the need for a valid, reliable, measure of learning.How can instructors optimise student learning in the college classroom? A key step towards answering this question involves gaining a thorough knowledge of how students, teachers, and textbooks interact to impact learning. How do students interact with the textbook? What are key student characteristics that predict their learning? The current research was designed to address these questions. Students commonly use the textbook as an aid in studying for exams, but many students do not read the textbook to the extent that they should (Gurung & Martin, 2011). In a comprehensive study conducted in the United States, we assessed how student attitudes (about their textbook, about learning, about study strategies, and about their instructor) are related to student performance (measured with a self-report of deep learning and an actual quiz).

Investigating Students’ Attitudes Toward Arabic and English Textbooks in Communication and Media

“…As reported by a prior study (Gurung et al, 2012), a large majority of respondents perceive English textbooks as the source of the quality content than the Arabic textbooks. They believe that titles of English textbooks represent the content than the Arabic textbooks.…”

“…Price (2012) believed that the potential problem with open textbooks is low-quality content and the use of inappropriate resources. Similarly, an analysis of seven textbooks in North America by Gurung et al (2012) indicated significant differences between the books in terms of quality and helpfulness.…”

Predicting learning: Comparing an open educational resource and standard textbooks.

“…The current studies take inspiration from national multisite studies of STBs measuring the key predictors of learning previously described (Gurung, Daniel, & Landrum, 2012; Gurung, Landrum, & Daniel, 2012). For example, Gurung et al 2012 first had students rate the quality and helpfulness of their introductory psychology textbooks, self-reported learning from the books, and then had students took a standardized quiz on material taken from the learning and biological psychology chapters.…”

An automatic method for assessing the teaching impact of books from online academic syllabi

“…This may be due, at least in part, to teaching contributions being less visible than research outputs and less amenable to clear quantitative indicators. There are many different types of materials that can support teaching (Fincher et al., , p. 888), but among them textbooks are particularly important, and monographs can also be useful (Gurung, Landrum, & Daniel, ; Gurung & Martin, ). Nevertheless, research priorities can discourage academics from writing student‐focused publications, such as textbooks (Jenkins, ) and monographs.…”