The Better Book Approach for Education Research and Development

Abstract

Background/Context Despite advances in the learning sciences, a persistent gap remains between research and practice. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study In this project, we develop and try out a new approach to education research and development in which researchers, designers/ developers, and instructors collaborate to continuously improve an online interactive textbook. Intervention/Program/Practice Using a “learn by doing” strategy, we first created a highly instrumented online textbook for introductory statistics. The design of our online book is based on the practicing-connections hypothesis: Instead of learning individual “bits” of information and then hoping that learners end up with transferable knowledge, we designed a curriculum to engage students in repeated practice of the connections—between core concepts, representations, and the world—that make knowledge transferable. The textbook includes more than 1,200 formative assessments, generating large amounts of data relevant to both the process and outcomes of college students learning of statistics. Using the affordances of technology, we then began working to apply routines and practices from open software development (Git) and improvement science (Toyota Kata) to build an improvement community focused on continuous improvement of the online book. We also are building a technology platform (CourseKata) to publish the book from markdown files stored on GitHub; distribute the book through widely used learning management systems; collect detailed student data and deliver it back to instructors and, in a de-identified form, researchers; and manage experiments that randomly assign different versions of content to different students within a single class, and then assess the effects on students’ learning. Research Design Our research design is a mixed-methods design research and improvement study. We gauge success through measures of process, outcome, and transfer. Conclusions/Recommendations We are at only the beginning of what we see as a lengthy project. We are encouraged, however, by our progress, and invite others—including researchers, designers/developers, and instructors—to join us in our improvement community focused on improving the transferable learning of basic statistical concepts at scale.

Representational-mapping strategies improve learning from an online statistics textbook.

“…A secondary goal of the study was to explore a new approach for moving learning strategies from the laboratory into authentic learning settings. Toward this end, we employed the better book approach to education R&D (Stigler et al, 2020) in which experiments are codesigned with researchers, instructors, and developers and implemented in the context of an online interactive textbook being used in real courses. Students participating in this study were enrolled in college statistics courses using the textbook, Statistics and Data Science: A Modeling Approach (Son & Stigler, 2017–2023).…”

“…The online textbook was hosted on the CourseKata platform (https://coursekata.org), which enables researchers to randomly assign students within the same class to slightly different versions of the material (Stigler et al, 2020). In the present study, students were randomly assigned to a version of the textbook that either included the representational-mapping intervention or not.…”

The “Better Book” Approach to Addressing Equity in Statistics: Centering the Motivational Experiences of Students from Racially Marginalized Backgrounds for Widespread Benefit

“…Second, improving an educational system is difficult because systems, especially innovative and novel systems, need to be implemented before they can be studied [25]. And third, the work of practitioners, researchers, and designers/developers tends to take place in silos instead of in the context of collaborative problem-based inquiry [24].…”

“…The "Better Book" approach [24], an innovative approach to doing research and development in educational contexts, addresses each of these challenges to making systemic change. The basic idea of the "Better Book" approach is that a community of Individual-change approaches may assign students to either receive an intervention or not in order to ascertain whether a particular intervention improves students' motivational experiences.…”

“…The "Better Book" approach [24], an innovative approach to doing research and development in educational contexts, addresses each of these challenges to making systemic change. The basic idea of the "Better Book" approach is that a community of designers/developers, researchers, instructors, and students focus their combined efforts on improving an online interactive textbook and its implementation.…”