Let Students Choose: Examining the Impact of Open Educational Resources on Performance in General Chemistry

Abstract

General chemistry is a gateway course for most STEM majors, so student success is a priority for chemistry faculty. Providing quality information resources for students, including textbooks, is one way that instructors can support student learning. However, these resources can be prohibitively expensive for some students, causing them to opt out of purchasing a textbook or incur stress from the costs of time and money to obtain a textbook. Open educational resources (OERs) are no-cost materials, available in the public domain, that students and instructors can use to reduce the financial burden of college coursework. However, as chemistry instructors consider adopting OERs, they may be concerned about the time cost to reframe their courses around different materials, the risk of negatively impacting student learning, and whether the benefits to students outweigh those costs and risks. Although the financial benefits to students have been established, and the evidence suggests minimal risk of poor academic outcomes, the cost to instructors continues to be prohibitively high. In this study, the instructor used a commercial text as the official resource for the course and offered students a choice to use either the commercial textbook or an OER textbook. This soft adoption of OERs dramatically reduced the time cost associated with using the OER for the instructor, while providing financial benefits to students who chose the OER. To address the risk that using an OER might negatively impact student performance, we investigated the impact of student textbook choice on student performance in general chemistry, controlling for relevant academic and affective variables. We found that students using OER performed as well as students using the commercial textbook. With minimal effort, chemistry instructors can provide a no-cost alternative for students, with confidence that it will not detrimentally affect their learning.