FACTORS AFFECTING THE CHOICE OF LEARNING RESOURCES BY STUDENTS

Abstract

With so much learning resources available at the click of a button, do we need textbooks? This question becomes especially provocative when faced with the prospect of having students spend hundreds of dollars every semester. In an attempt to lower the cost of a higher education, Open Educational Resources (OER) programs seek to replace the current model of teaching from textbooks with a curriculum comprised of freely available information. However, research has shown that there is a decline in of reading of texts by students, regardless of the format of texts. There are also conflicting research results on whether textbook reading in university-level courses is correlated with improvements in student grades. The conflicting results raise many questions about the role of the textbook in tertiary education. In an effort to answer these questions, we conducted a preliminary survey on textbook usage in several undergraduate introductory programming courses. The objective of the study is to examine the factors that motivate students to use required textbooks, determine their preferred textbook format, and investigate how students learn and prepare to meet course requirements. In the study, the principal component analysis was used to identify the learning factors that most influence the resources that students use to prepare for their classes. The findings in the study suggest that “Perceived Benefit” and “Alternatives” were the most important factors impacting the use of textbooks. The data analysis from the study provides insight into the potential benefits of the use of a textbook. The results of this study and the conflicting results from previous research on the use and efficacy of textbooks appear to suggest that the textbook as a learning instrument needs to change to support “How People Learn.”.