The Impact of Free and Open Educational Resource Adoption on Community College Student Achievement and Course Withdrawal Rates
taught multiple sections of the same course in both semesters ; some courses were taught by multiple faculty members in both the non-OER and OER semesters ; some courses are only offered once each semester and taught by a single faculty member . The courses and number of sections selected are listed in Table 1 .
Table 1 . Courses and the number of sections selected in each semester
Course
Semester commercial
No . of sections
Semester OER
No . of sections
BUSI-111 Introduction to Business Fall 2017 10 Fall 2018 10 BIOL-124 Anatomy & Physiology I Spring 2018 7 Spring 2019 4 COMM-101 Speech Spring 2018 3 Spring 2019 3 ENGL-112 English Composition II Spring 2018 2 Spring 2019 2
FITN-132 Cardiovascular Conditioning
Spring 2018 1 Spring 2019 1
HLTH-109 Pharmacology Spring 2018 2 Spring 2019 1 PHYS-130 Astronomy Spring 2018 2 Spring 2019 2
For all students in each section , Institutional Research provided the following de-identified data :
• final grade
• term GPA
• full-time / part-time status
• first-time student status
• gender
• ethnicity
• Pell eligibility
Data were received for a total of 1,212 students . Three students ’ final grades were listed as AU indicating they were Audit status . These three students were removed from the study for a total of 1,209 student grades for analysis . The breakdown of students by course is shown in Table 2 .
W ( withdrawal ) grades were separated from A through F grades for analysis . The remaining 1,111 A through F grades were converted to the numeric scale used for GPA calculation at the institution :
A = 4.0 B + = 3.5 B = 3.0 C + = 2.5 C = 2.0 D = 1.0 F = 0
A two-sample t-test of means was performed for all A through F grades to determine if there was a significant difference in final course grades . Then , two- and three-way ANOVAs were used to determine if various demographic factors , when combined with
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