OER-enabled open and culturally responsive practices and students' academic and social-emotional outcomes

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Project Citation:

Griffiths, Rebecca, and Joshi, Ela. OER-enabled open and culturally responsive practices and students’ academic and social-emotional outcomes. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2025-05-28. https://doi.org/10.3886/E227022V1

Project Description

Summary:

Open educational resources (OER) have gained widespread adoption in higher education courses as an alternative to traditional textbooks. Using OER course materials reduces the financial burden on students and ensures they have access to course materials from day one. Further, the affordances of OER, which allow instructors to revise and remix content, open up possibilities for instructors to transform the substance and delivery of their courses. For example, instructors can give students more agency over course topics and assignments, select more relevant and meaningful texts, and give students opportunities to create original content. These possibilities are collectively referred to as open educational practices (OEP).

A previous study by SRI Education (SRI) in partnership with Achieving the Dream (ATD) explored the ways in which OEP can be used across components of a course and further examined intersections between OEP and culturally responsive educational practices rooted in a long history of scholarship. We found that the use of transformative instructional practices with OER was uneven and lacked sufficient resources through institution-wide initiatives. Further, there was limited empirical evidence to show how the use of OEP impacts students’ experiences and outcomes, or how faculty development programming could support these practices.

A state’s annual OER grant program presented a unique opportunity to explore how OER materials can support open and culturally responsive practices through a statewide program. SRI partnered with ATD and the state agency overseeing higher education institutions to conduct a mixed-methods study to understand how 2- and 4-year college instructors use open and culturally responsive practices as enabled by OER and how students experience them.

With professional learning support from ATD and the state agency, grantees redesigned their courses to integrate OER materials and OER-enabled open and culturally responsive practices. For 2 years, SRI collected survey, instructor log, interview, observation, and administrative data to unpack instructors’ and students’ experiences with redesigning and learning from courses, respectively, that used open and culturally responsive practices. To design the study, the SRI study team used the Framework for Enacting Open and Culturally Responsive Practices, which draws from literature on both OEP and culturally responsive educational practices.

We found that instructors made material changes to their course design and delivery, integrating student-centered practices and inclusive content and fostering peer-to-peer collaboration through open-ended activities that offered students greater voice and choice. Using OER-enabled open and culturally responsive practices improved instructors’ ability to deliver high-quality instruction and helped students experience more peer-to-peer learning. Instructors also became more flexible in their courses and shifted their course goals to include the development of more soft skills and more critical-thinking skills.

Students in the redesigned courses appreciated the agency they had in learning, although some preferred traditional activities and assessments. Additionally, students in the redesigned courses favored the range of perspectives offered by and the relevance of the instructional materials. Although we did not find overall differences in course grades for students in redesigned courses, we observed a significant increase in course grades for students receiving Pell grants. Furthermore, students in the redesigned courses reported greater participation and more opportunities for their voices to be heard in the courses, among other improvements in their social-emotional outcomes, such as students’ functional skills, intrapersonal competencies, and behaviors.

These findings suggest that concerted institutional efforts can catalyze transformative teaching practices when combined with supports for OER course conversion. Further, students and instructors felt engaged and more involved in teaching and learning through these changes. In some cases, instructors and students experienced challenges in designing and engaging with these courses, respectively. While our results do not support claims that these transformative practices led to differences in academic outcomes, we encourage additional research given the limitations of any individual study. The benefits of this program also merit investigation into barriers to and facilitators in scaling, in particular how generative AI tools might reduce the burden of producing high-quality OER course content. 

NOTE: The data shared in this repository are the quantitative data used to examine the impacts on students' academic and social-emotional outcomes from taking a class redesigned to incorporate OER-enabled open and culturally responsive practices. Specifically, the data include students' administrative data and students' survey responses.

Funding Sources: William & Flora Hewlett Foundation

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: higher education; oer; open educational practices

Geographic Coverage: one state

Time Period(s): 5/1/2022 – 2/28/2025 (Summer 2022 - Spring 2025)

Collection Date(s): 4/1/2023 – 9/1/2024 (Spring 2023 - Fall 2024)

Data Type(s): administrative records data; survey data

Collection Notes: The data shared in this repository are the quantitative data used to examine the impacts on students' academic and social-emotional outcomes from taking a class redesigned to incorporate OER-enabled open and culturally responsive practices. Specifically, the data include students' administrative data and students' survey responses.

Methodology

Response Rate: A total of 354 students were included in the administrative data sample (189 treatment and 165 control).

A total of 221 students were included in the administrative data sample (134 treatment and 87 control).

See "Sampling" for description of analytic samples.

Sampling: We recruited a purposive sample of intervention instructors and comparison instructors teaching similar courses. Students from all study courses were invited to complete the survey. We collected administrative data on all students in study courses.

We created two samples.
1) RQ1 was answered using the sample of students enrolled in study courses who were 18 or older and for whom we had course data for.
2) RQ2 was answered using the sample of students enrolled in study courses who were 18 or older, and for whom we had course data for, who consented to the survey and completed at least one question on the survey, and who were able to match with the administrative data.

Data Source:

Data were collected from 3 colleges. The state agency collects some college's data centrally and provided the SRI research team data for 2 colleges. The data for the third college was provided to the SRI research team directly by the college. The SRI research team merged the 2 datasets together.

Survey data were administered by the SRI research team and merged with the administrative data using student IDs (primary matching variable) and names and emails (secondary matching variables).

See instrument (uploaded) for details on survey factors and items.

Collection Mode(s): other; web-based survey

Scales: See instrument (uploaded) for details on survey factors and items.

Weights: We used inverse probability weights—a small-sample alternative to propensity score matching—to statistically adjust the analysis (Holmes & Olsen, 2010). Weights were created using binary indicators for student race/ethnicity and Pell grant receipt, as well as a categorial variable for high school GPA.

Unit(s) of Observation: Student

Geographic Unit: n/a

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V1 [2025-05-28]

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