University students’ engagement with digital mathematics textbooks: a case of linear algebra

Abstract

We investigated university students’ engagement with digital textbooks by analysing their real-time viewing and use in a linear algebra course taught at four different universities in the United States. Viewing data over a semester was complemented with responses to bi-weekly open-ended surveys and other course artefacts, such as course syllabi. With our approach to ask students about their viewing data in surveys, we were able to relate student majors to textbook engagement and to document more and different uses of textbook elements than what has been reported so far. We used descriptive statistics and frequency graphs to analyse the viewing data and a grounded analytical approach to survey data. By using the didactical tetrahedron, we found that textbook engagement dropped when the algebraic language and content of the textbook was not institutionally legitimized and when the textbook did not directly satisfy interests associated with earning a degree. Textbook engagement was higher than what could have been anticipated by syllabi for students majoring in disciplines other than mathematics. We propose areas for further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Engagement with textbooks
• digital mathematics textbook
• textbook use
• linear algebra
• university education

Acknowledgements

We thank David Farmer and the American Institute of Mathematics for the development of heat maps of HTML textbook use and Diana Curtis for her research support on this project and the Research on Teaching Mathematics in Undergraduate Settings (RTMUS) group at the University of Michigan and the anonymous reviewers for feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The OECD (2007) defines open educational resources (OER) as ‘digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licenses’ (p. 10).

2 If a user leaves their browser open for a long time, the script will record those seconds, suggesting a prolonged viewing. In our data, related to days close to the exams, we used a threshold of 300 min (5 h). Only data from one student was removed, as their viewing exceeded 9 h.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this work has been provided by the National Science Foundation [DUE-IUSE 1624634, 1821509].