Open Book Test: Can a Cost Saving Measure Also Raise Performance? | EdSurge News

Discussions about the future of school curricula tend to be cannibalized by the sensationalized debate over the Common Core, but for those able to glimpse the long-term future, a key issue is open educational resources (OER). For many, the question is not so much if or when OER will become the standard, but how we can maximize the strength and sustainability of their impact. Yet for many others--specifically those making the policy decisions that affect thousands of kids--the big question remains whether or not OER work. To date, there has been little empirical evidence demonstrating its effect in classrooms. And with the phrase “evidence-based” now being thrown around like champagne in a celebratory locker room, more is needed before OER make large inroads in schools. In a new study published in the Educational Researcher, however, a big leap toward that point has been taken. The study, which examined a school district in Utah, provides one of the largest, methodologically rigorous evaluations of OER to date. The research was led by Jared Robinson, a PhD student at BYU, and Lumen Learning co-founder David Wiley was among three other BYU researchers who were co-authors on the paper ... What did the researchers find? Across all three subjects students in OER classrooms performed better than students in normal classrooms--a difference that was statistically significant. When each subject was analyzed individually, the difference was only statistically significant for chemistry. It’s worth noting that although the effects were statistically significant, the effect sizes were extremely small. (Specifically, the effect of OER textbooks on a student’s performance was about a quarter of the size of the estimated influence of his or her prior GPA.) Nevertheless, the impact of classroom materials on performance is generally fairly limited, and so the small effect sizes should be viewed within that context.  More importantly, given the other benefits of OER--chiefly, enormous cost savings--the key finding may simply be that the students who used OER didn’t perform any worse. As long as OER textbooks are just as good (or better), schools can use them to save money, then put the funds toward increasing achievement in other areas.  One limitation of the study is that it doesn’t shed light on exactly why OER are effective ..."