This study is one in a series designed to explore the process by which faculty members select and use the educational materials employed in their courses. The most common of these is the required textbook: faculty members typically choose one or more books that all students are required to use throughout the course. Faculty also employ a wide…

This study explores how faculty members select and use the educational materials employed in their courses. The primary sample represents all teaching faculty across all types of degree-granting higher education institution in the United States. Two subgroups of faculty are called out for detailed examination: those teaching large-enrollment…

Research indicates multi-section coordination improves the academic performance of students in STEM education. This paper describes the process of coordination in Precalculus, Calculus 1, and Calculus 2 courses undertaken by a large department that grew from the merger of two institutions through a pilot program and a project grant. Components…

Open educational resources (OER) can make educational resources widely available to all students and educators for free; however, OER are still untried in many academic programmes in higher education. This article reports a case of adoption of an open access textbook for an introductory information systems course and discusses the process and…

This study is designed to explore the process by which faculty members select the educational materials that they employ in their courses. The most common of these is the required textbook--faculty members typically select one or more books that all students are required to use through the duration of the course. Faculty also employ a wide range…

This study is one of a series using consistent definitions of key concepts to support analysis of changes over time. The studies are designed to explore the process by which faculty members select and use the educational materials that they employ in their courses. The most common of these is the required textbook: faculty members typically select…

The enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and the subsequent succession of legislative acts have had a profound impact on educational policy. An increased emphasis on teacher accountability and effectiveness led to the use of standardized test results to determine tangible rewards or punishments. In response, a culture of teaching to…

The benefits of teaching from a global perspective far outweigh the disadvantages. Teaching from a global perspective provides the employer with global workers. Such teaching produces students who possess the knowledge of languages, culture, social systems, dress, religion, and cultural norms, as well as skills for employment in the global…

The objective of this study is to better understand the process by which faculty members select the educational materials that they employ in their courses. The educational resource that people are most familiar with is the required textbook: faculty members select one or more books that all students are required to use through the duration of the…

Introductory psychology students at a technical college, 2-year community college, and a regional university rated how important textbook chapters or topics were to them now and in the future and how interesting they were. Importance and interest ratings were highly correlated, and the whole course was rated of greater importance and interest than…

Higher education is commonly described as offering combinations of work and leisure, but the implied relationship is often limited. Different conceptions of leisure, especially leisure as pleasurable experience, raise new possibilities for seeing academic activity itself as leisure in several important senses. The importance of identifying…

A corpus of current editions of statistics textbooks was assessed to compare aspects and levels of readability for the topics of "measures of center," "line of fit," "regression analysis," and "regression inference." Analysis with lexical software of these text selections revealed that the large corpus can…

In 2006, after nearly two decades of civil conflict and instability, Liberia's physical and governance infrastructure was destroyed and its brutalized population was stricken with high levels of illiteracy and unemployment. The newly formed government of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was not able to meet the stringent requirements imposed by the…

The author's quasi-experimental study compares undergraduate students' academic performance and experiences as a function of using electronic (n = 117) versus traditional (n = 116) textbooks in a developmental psychology course. Student exam scores did not differ significantly as a function of textbook format. Students who used the traditional…

Sales figures and recollections of psychologists indicate textbooks play a central role in psychology students' education, yet instructors typically must select texts under time pressure and with incomplete information. Although selection aids are available, none adequately address the accuracy of texts. We describe a technique for sampling…