ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research would not be possible without the assistance
of a number of organizations. First, we wish to thank The William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation for their considerable help in framing the project, as well
as their support of the data collection, analysis, and report creation. Their
background and knowledge of open educational resources and contacts within the open
education community was invaluable in defining the focus of the study. We also wish
to thank the Global Healthy Living Foundation for their support in the
administration of the Hewlett Foundation contract.
This report has benefited from reviews and feedback from
many experts. We wish to thank Nicole Allen, Michelle Austin, Layla Bonnot, Angela
Haydel DeBarger, Kate Gerson, and Cable Green, all of whom improved the report
though their suggestions. All remaining issues are the sole responsibility of
the authors.
The report presents results derived from a nationally representative
sample of K-12 district administrators. We want to thank all those who took
the time to provide us with their detailed and thoughtful responses. We
understand that you are very busy people, and appreciate your effort very much.
This report would not be possible without you, and we hope that you find it
useful.
I. Elaine Allen
Jeff Seaman
Co-Directors
Babson Survey Research Group
September 2017
Key
Findings
Some of the key findings from this
study of 584 K-12 school districts, collected in the spring of 2017,
representing 48 states and the District of Columbia:
·
77% of districts made at least one full-course
curriculum adoption decision in the past three years.
·
Larger districts (over 2,500 students) are the most
likely to engage in adoption decisions (84%).
· Two-thirds of all
districts make decisions in more than one subject area, with one-third
selecting in two subject areas and one-third selecting in three or more.
· Most districts make
an adoption decision for Mathematics (59%), followed by English Language Arts
(44%), Science (29%), and History and Social Studies (19%).
· Almost all
districts include teachers, district-level administrators, and principals in
the decision-making process.
· Teachers have
decision-making power in 94% of districts, followed by district-level
administrators (75%), and principals (73%).
· Outside experts and
parents are included in the adoption process in about half of all districts,
but rarely have decision-making power (outside experts 21% and parents 18%).
·
Districts cite five or more factors as being "very
important" or "critical" in their adoption decision. The top
three are comprehensive content, working with existing technology, and cost.
· Cost is far more
important among districts with high rates of children in poverty (52% say it is
"critical") than those with low rates of child poverty (26% say it is
"critical").
· Districts adopt
material from more than a dozen sources, but the top three publishers
(McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) command the
market.
· The overwhelming
reason districts cite as the reason to engage in an adoption decision is a need
to select new material to meet changing standards.
·
A majority of districts are replacing curricula resources
that have been in use for 6 to 10 years.
· The entire adoption
process takes less than a year, with most running 4 to 9 months.
· A majority of districts
begin the process by considering 3 to 5 curricula alternatives, and narrow that
number to 2 or 3 for final evaluation.
· District decision
makers are reasonably aware of copyright and public domain licensing, but are
far less aware of the Creative Commons alternative.
· Awareness of open
educational resources (OER) is low, with only one-third of districts aware of
the term and its licensing.
· Awareness and
adoption of specific OER materials is higher than awareness of the term itself;
two-thirds of all districts are aware of at least one open full-course
curriculum alternative and over a third have actively considered at least one.
· Open licensed
full-course curricula materials have been adopted by 16% of all districts.
· Districts with a high
proportion of students in poverty have adopted open licensed full-course
curricula materials at twice the rate of districts with low rates of child
poverty (22% as compared to 10%).
Overview
The objective of this study is to better understand the
process by which K-12 school districts select curricula materials in four
critical subject areas: Mathematics, English Language Arts, Science, and
History and Social Studies. A single adoption decision by a single school
district has the potential to impact what thousands of students are taught and
learn. Curricula decisions not only determine the specific elements that will
be taught in class, but also have considerable impact on how that material is
presented and taught. This research has two primary goals:
· To understand the process by
which K-12 school districts select and adopt full-course curricula materials,
with an eye to understanding how that process might be influenced.
·
To understand the degree to which
K-12 school districts are aware of the concepts of open educational resources
(OER), and the extent to which they have adopted OER materials.
Adoption
Process
Understanding the adoption process is critical to
understanding how to foster the adoption of "better" curricula
materials, where "better" could be related to the content included in
the curriculum, the methods of instruction that the curriculum encourages, or
the nature of the curricula materials themselves (e.g., open licensed).
The "build it and they will come" approach,
where an alternative is so compelling that districts rush to adopt it, will NOT
work. School districts do not engage in an adoption process because they have
found a compelling curricula alternative. Almost all decisions are driven by a
belief that the current materials no longer meet current standards, not by the
characteristics of potential alternatives.
There is no single decision maker. Adoption decisions are
collaborative, with multiple players having decision-making power (almost
always including teachers and district administrators, but often joined by
others) and a second tier of those who can advise, but do not have
decision-making power (typically from groups such as outside experts and
parents).
For all the players
involved, decisions are made reasonably quickly, taking less than a year from
start to finish. There is little evidence, given this decision speed, of any
extensive "try it before you buy it" piloting of materials on a test
basis before adoption.
While the pool of potential curricula publishers is very
wide, the "big three" publishers (McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) command the lion's share of all adoption decisions.
While no other publishers come close to the scope of adoption of these three,
that does not mean that others are not being adopted - they are, albeit at much
lower rates than the big three.
As might be expected by a process involving this many
decision makers, there is no one single factor that is cited as driving the
decision - most districts cite five or more factors as being "very
important" or "critical" to their decision. For all the variety
of factors playing a role, there are three that are most common: comprehensive
content, working with current technology, and cost.
What then is the most effective way of reaching a district
making an adoption decision and influencing that choice? Based on the results
of this research, there appear to be a few guiding principles:
Be easy to find when the district begins looking. The
selection of potential curricula to include in the evaluation process happens
very early. There is a narrow time window, of several weeks to at most a few
months, where the potential candidates are selected. The advantage of the big
three publishers is considerable, but not overwhelming - most districts look at
3 to 5 alternatives. The curricula material needs to be easy to find; if it is
not discovered during the initial selection window it will not be considered.
Clearly meet all appropriate standards. The vast
majority of adoption decisions are driven by a district’s perception that they need
material that aligns with new standards. Any potential product has to clearly
articulate how it meets those standards if it is going to make it into the
field for consideration.
Be on the state approved or recommended list. In
adoption states,
where all choices must be made from a list of approved products, any product
not on that list does not have a chance. For states with a
"recommended" list, as opposed to a required list, being on the state
list gives you a big leg up. The one mitigating factor that allows for
potential adoption of items not on a state recommended list is the large number
of players in the decision process. Many are unaware of the existence of a
state-level list.
Work with the widest array of technological
infrastructure options. Being able to slot any new curricula materials
into the district's existing technology is critical across all types and sizes
of districts.
Low cost. Cost is important for all districts, and
critical for those with greater numbers of lower income students. It is not
clear that cost is the primary driver of the decision, but it clearly has an
important role in selecting among competing options in the final phase of the
process.
Comprehensive content. The most important criteria
in the decision remains the content of the curricula materials. It is also subjective
- what one district considers "comprehensive" may be seen as
"lacking" by another. All materials being considered need to appeal
to a wide range of people and roles. Successful adoption means approval by
teachers, district administrators, principals, and parents.
Open
Educational Resources
The Hewlett Foundation defines
open educational resources (OER) as:
OER are teaching, learning, and research
resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an
intellectual property license that permits their free use and re-purposing by
others.
The stated level of awareness of
the terms and concepts of OER among K-12 district decision makers is very
high. However, that awareness does not extend to knowledge of open licensing.
Nearly three-quarters of respondents say that they are aware of OER, but if we
count only those who are also be aware of Creative Commons licensing, this
drops to only one-third.
Awareness of specific open license products is much higher
than awareness of OER concepts. Two-thirds of all districts report that they
are aware of at least one set of OER full-course curricula materials, and 37%
of districts have actively considered at least one OER curriculum for adoption.
OER curricula materials have been adopted by 16% of districts.
Awareness and adoption of OER curricula materials is
indicative of awareness of the particular product, and does not imply an
awareness that it is an OER openly licensed product. A sizeable portion of
districts that have reviewed and adopted OER curricula material remain unaware
that it is OER.
Curricula
Resources
The objective of this study is to better understand the
process by which K-12 school districts select curricula materials. The project
is focused on adoption decisions in four critical subject areas: Mathematics,
English Language Arts, Science, and History and Social Studies. The report
focuses exclusively on materials that provide a full-course curriculum.
Supplemental materials, or curricula materials that are used for only a portion
of a course, are specifically excluded.
All results included in this report represent respondents who are knowledgeable
of the adoption process for their district. The largest faction of survey
respondents led the decision process for their district, while other
respondents were participants in the process, with or without a decision role.
In addition to
examining the overall curricula selection process, this study also explores a
particular class of educational materials: those classified as open educational
resources (OER). The Hewlett Foundation defines open educational resources
(OER) as:
OER are teaching,
learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been
released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and
re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course
materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other
tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
An important aspect of the examination of the use of
educational resources is the licensing status of such materials – who owns the copyright
to the materials, and does the district have the right to copy, reuse, modify, and
redistribute the content? The legal mechanism that educators are most familiar
with is that of copyright. As noted by the U.S. Copyright office, copyright
is:
A form of protection
provided by the laws of the United States for "original works of
authorship," including literary, dramatic, musical, architectural,
cartographic, choreographic, pantomimic, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, and
audiovisual creations. "Copyright" literally means the right to copy
but has come to mean that body of exclusive rights granted by law to copyright
owners for protection of their work. … Copyright covers both published and
unpublished works.
Not all material is copyrighted. Some content may be
ineligible for copyright, copyrights may have expired, or authors may have
dedicated their content to the public domain (e.g., using Creative Commons
public domain dedication).
Public domain is a
designation for content that is not protected by any copyright law or other
restriction and may be freely copied, shared, altered and republished by
anyone. The designation means, essentially, that the content belongs to the
community at large.
An intermediate stage
between the traditional copyright, with all rights reserved, and public domain,
where no rights are reserved, is provided by Creative Commons licenses. A
Creative Commons license is not an alternative to copyright, but rather a
modification of the traditional copyright license that grants some rights to
the public.
The
Creative Commons (CC) open licenses give everyone from individual authors to
governments and institutions a simple, standardized way to grant copyright
permissions to their creative work. CC licenses allow creators to retain
copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of
their work per the terms of the license. CC licenses ensure authors get credit
(attribution) for their work, work globally, and last as long as applicable
copyright lasts. CC licenses do not affect freedoms (e.g., fair use rights)
that the law grants to users of creative works otherwise protected by copyright.
The most common way to openly license copyrighted
education materials – making them OER – is to add a Creative Commons license to
the educational resource. CC licenses are standardized, free-to-use, open
copyright licenses.
STUDY
RESULTS:
Respondents
The K-12 district
respondents are very familiar with the full-course curriculum adoption decision
for their districts. Over three-quarters say that they are “very” familiar,
with an additional 17% being “somewhat” familiar.
This study is based on responses from 584
K-12 school districts collected in the spring of 2017, and represents 48 states
and the District of Columbia. Respondents were very familiar with the
curriculum adoption process for their district. Respondents who were not
familiar with the process were asked a few general questions and then thanked
for their time and efforts. Their responses are not included in the analysis
for the report.
Surveys were directed to and responses were received from
persons in a variety of roles in the district, including Superintendent,
Business/Purchasing Director, Instructional Technology Director,
Curriculum/Instructional Director, and Directors for individual subject areas
(e.g., mathematics, science, or reading). The number and composition of the
roles varies considerable by district size. Smaller districts are far more
likely to have one person performing a critical role for decisions in multiple
subject areas, while larger districts might have separate teams for a science
decision than for a mathematics decision.
Nature of
Curricula Decisions
Over three-quarters of
districts have made a full-course curricula decision in the past three years,
with two-thirds of these making decisions in more than one subject area. The
most common subject area is Mathematics, followed by English Language Arts.
Full-course curricula adoption decisions are very common among K-12 districts.
Over three-quarters of districts have made at least one such full-course
curricula decision in the past three years. Note that this number only counts
districts that have made full-course curricula adoption decisions for
Mathematics, English Language Arts, Science, and History and Social Studies.
Those making adoption decision for other subject areas, or selecting other than
full-course materials, are not included.
While all types and sizes of districts show a similar pattern, districts with
more than 2,500 students are more likely (84%) to have made full-course
curricula decision for Mathematics, English Language Arts, Science, and History
and Social Studies than smaller districts.
Districts are making multiple decisions across many grade ranges and subject
areas. One-third of districts made an adoption decision for a single subject
area, one-third selected new curricula materials in two subject areas, and
one-third selected more than two subjects.
Not all subject areas are equally represented among these adoption
decisions. Most districts have made a curricula decision for Mathematics
(59%), followed by English Language Arts (44%), Science (30%), and History and
Social Studies (19%).
Decision
Makers
Adopting a full-course
curriculum is a group activity. Teachers almost always play a role, typically
joined by administrators and principals. Parents and outside experts are
included by about half of the districts.
Curricula adoption decisions typically include representatives from multiple
roles within the district. Virtually all (93%) districts report that teachers
have a decision-making role, with an additional 6% saying that they provide
advice. District-level administrators and principals have a decision-making
role for roughly three-quarters of the districts. Over one half of districts
use outside experts in some capacity, more often to provide advice (31%) than
in a decision-making role (21%). Less than one half of the districts include
parents in the process, and when they do it is typically to provide advice
(30%), rather than as a decision maker (18%).
Larger districts (those with over 2,500 students) include parents in the
process at higher rates than smaller districts. While the proportion of larger
districts that include parents in the adoption process is higher, the pattern
of confining them to an advisory role is the same across all sizes of
districts.
Factors
Driving Selection
There is no single factor
that drives a district selection process, with most districts citing five or
more factors as "very important" or "critical" to their
decision. Comprehensive content, working with current technology, and cost are
cited most often.
The factors of comprehensive content, working with current technology, and cost,
are cited as “Critical” in the adoption decision far more often than other
factors. The inclusion of supplemental materials and the ability of curricula
materials to be adapted and/or edited follow these top three in importance.
Other factors are seen as critical by a smaller proportion of districts. One
outlier is the inclusion of the materials on a state-approved list. This outlier
can be critical for districts where state-recommended or state-required lists
limit the range of choices, but are not of interest for districts where the
state does not have this role.
Not all
factors are of equal importance across all types of districts. The cost of materials
is one example. Districts that have over 25% of their population aged 5 to 17
living in poverty cite cost as critical to the decision process twice as often
as districts where less than 10% of the population aged 5 to 17 live in
poverty.
Curricula
Sources
Districts select
full-course curricula materials from over two-dozen publishers. Three of
these, McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, are used
far more often than all other publishers.
Districts use materials for a wide range of publishers, listing over two dozen
such publishers as having provided full-course curricula materials for their
district. While no one publisher commands the lion’s share, McGraw-Hill,
Pearson Education, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are each mentioned by similar
number of districts. No other publisher has half as many mentions as these top
three.
The pattern of choice of publisher is very similar across districts of all
sizes, with the same top three publishers showing a similar lead among small,
medium, and large enrollment districts. There are a few differences among the
rankings of the other publishers, however. EngageNY, a publisher of open educational
resources, is twice as likely to have been selected among districts with over
25% of their population aged 5 to 17 living in poverty, compared to those with
less than 10% of the population aged 5 to 17 living in poverty (23% as compared
to 11%).
Decision
Process
The vast majority of
district adoption decisions are driven by an external factor: changing
standards. Districts typically consider 3 to 5 alternatives initially,
narrowing that number to 2 or 3 for a final decision. Most decision processes
take the better part of a year to complete, with only 10% taking longer than
that. The curricula materials being replaced are usually 6 to 10 years old.
What causes a school district to replace its current curriculum with something
new? Is there a regular schedule where materials are reviewed and replaced, or
are districts reacting to external factors that are forcing them into a
decision process? The primary driver for all curricula decision is external:
new or changing standards. Over two-thirds of all districts that made a
curricula decision in the past three years cite this as the reason for
beginning the process.
The second most cited reason, “Other,” further reinforces
new and changing standards as the primary driver. The districts that selected
Other as the primary driving factor for undergoing their review and decision
process were asked to provide a writen explanantion of their response. The
vast majority of these explanations listed multiple factors, such as a regular review
and changing standards. “Changing standards” were cited in almost all of the
these responses. Over
three-quarters of all districts cited changing educational standards, at least
in part, as the reason for curricula adoption decisions. Any change to these
external factors, such as mass adoption of new standards or stabilization of
standards for a period of time, will have a large impact on future district
adoption rates.
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Curricula decisions are being made by K-12 districts on a fairly regular basis.
Only 1% of the decisions were to replace materials that had been in place for 1
or 2 years, with 13% replacing materials that were 3 to 5 years old. The
majority (57%) of all districts were making an adoption decision to replace
materials that had been in place for 6 to 10 years.
K-12 districts typically evaluate multiple alternatives in their process of
selecting new curricula materials. Only 3% of districts limit their adoption
process to an evaluation of a single alternative. The largest proportion (30%)
evaluate three alternatives, with most districts examining four or more
alternatives.
Most districts use a multistep decision process, building
a large initial list of possible alternative curriculum sources and then
narrowing that list down for the final stage of the decision. While the
majority of districts (51%) include four or more alternatives at the beginning
of the process, many of these are eliminated early in the process. Only 21% of
districts do a final review that includes four or more alternatives; the vast
majority include only three (42%) or two (26%) options for active review.
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The curriculum decision process takes a number of months from beginning to end,
but rarely exceeds a year in length. The modal length for the process is 6 to
9 months, with 33% of all districts reporting this time. More districts
complete the process in less time than this (22% report 4 to 5 months; 14% report
2 to 3 months) than those for whom the process took longer (17% report 10 to 12
months; 10% report that the process took over a year). Only 1% of districts
completed the process in a single month.
Not all types of districts take the same length of time to complete the
selection process. Districts with a greater proportion of their students
living in poverty complete the process in a shorter amount of time. As noted
earlier, these districts also rate the cost of the materials as far more
important to their decision process, so it may be that they make their selection
faster because they can quickly eliminate the higher cost alternatives.
Awareness
of Licensing and Open Educational Resources
Awareness of copyright and
the public domain is much higher among districts than is awareness of Creative
Commons licensing. Nearly three-quarters of respondents claim some level of
awareness of OER, but this drops to only one-third when awareness of licensing
is included. Only 40% of districts have any level of awareness of the federal
#GoOpen campaign.
Respondents were asked about their level of awareness of copyright, public
domain, and open licensing. The availability of open licensing and the ability
to reuse and remix content is central to the concept of open educational
resources. This makes it critical to understand the level of awareness of these
concepts, if we are to understand if districts are selecting materials because of
licensing, or for other factors.
Most respondents report that they are aware of the
copyright status of classroom content (83% “Very aware” or “Aware”) and public
domain licensing (63% “Very aware” or “Aware”), but fall short on awareness of
Creative Commons licensing. Less than 40% of respondents report that they are
aware of Creative Commons licensing.
Survey respondents were asked to self-report their level
of awareness of open educational resources. As noted in previous reports, the
exact wording of the question is critical in accurately measuring the level of
OER awareness. Many respondents have only a vague understanding of the details
of what constitutes open educational resources. Many confuse “open” with
“free,” and assume all free resources are OER. Still others will confuse “open
resources” with “open source,” and assume OER refers only to open-source
software.
Multiple wordings for these questions were tested for prior Babson Survey
Research Group reports. The version used here was found to have the best
balance in differentiating among the different levels of awareness, while
avoiding leading those with no previous knowledge of the concept.
One half of all respondents say that they are either
“Aware” or “Very Aware” of open educational resources. A smaller portion (15%)
report that they are only “Somewhat Aware,” and over a third say that they are
not aware.
As described earlier, district administrators may have
only a “fuzzy” understanding and awareness of open educational resources. By
combining responses to additional questions about the licensing, we can get a
more precise understanding of their true level of awareness. Since licensing
is critical to the concept of OER, examining the difference between respondents
who report that they are aware of OER and those who report that they are aware
of both OER and Creative Commons licensing gives us a good indication of their
depth of understanding of OER. If respondents who report that they are unaware
of Creative Commons licensing are removed from any of the “aware” categories of
the measure of OER awareness, we create a much stricter index of OER awareness.
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The level of OER awareness drops when we apply this stricter definition,
implying that respondents may be claiming to be aware of OER, but they have
only a limited understanding of the concepts. Those classified as “very aware”
dips from 19% to 13%, “aware” drops from 31% to 15%, and “somewhat aware” from
15% to 6%. The overall proportion classified into any of the “aware”
categories changes from 65% when awareness of Creative Commons is not required,
to 34% when it is required.
District administrators in smaller distrcits (those with less than 1,000
students) are considerably less aware of OER than their counterparts in larger
districts. The proportion who are “Very Aware” is only 6% amoung the smallest
districts (compared to 17% in districts with more than 2,500 students).
The U.S. Department of Education created the #GoOpen
campaign to encourage the use of open educational resources.
The campaign was launched in October 2015.
The U.S. Department of Education’s #GoOpen campaign encourages
states, school districts and educators to use openly licensed educational
materials to transform teaching and learning.
Respondents were asked if they were aware of this initiative. Only 21%
reported that they were either “Very familiar” or “Somewhat familiar” with the
program, with an additional 19% reporting that while they had heard of the
program, they did not know much about it. The majority of district decision
makers (60%) report that they are “not aware” of the program.
Open
Educational Resource Material Adoptions
K-12 school districts have
a greater degree of awareness of OER materials than of OER concepts and
definitions. Two-thirds of all districts are aware of at least one OER
full-course curriculum, with 37% having actively considered at least one for
adoption. A full 16% of districts have adopted at least one full-course OER
curriculum.
Other studies by the Babson Survey Research Group (BSRG) have
demonstrated that educators are unreliable in reporting if they use open
educational resources. In addition to only a fuzzy understanding of the
concepts of OER, most respondents were not fully aware of the licensing terms
of the products that they were considering and/or adopting. In order to get a
more reliable indicator of OER product awareness and use, it is necessary to
pose the question in a form that elicits reliable responses. This study uses
the same approach as previous BSRG studies of OER adoption, presenting
respondents with specific lists of products and asking them if they know of the
product, have considered it, or have adopted it. District administrators may
not know the details of OER definitions, or the licensing terms of specific materials,
but they do know the names of products that they have examined or adopted.
Respondents were presented with a list of K-12 full-course
curricula materials, all of which are classified as OER, covering a total of 14
different combinations of subject area and publishers.
The options presented were:
·
Eureka Math (Great Minds)
·
Secondary Math One: An Integrated
Approach (Mathematics Vision Project)
·
Secondary Two Mathematics:
Integrated Pathway CCSS (Mathematics Vision Project)
·
Secondary
Three Mathematics: Integrated Pathway CCSS (Mathematics Vision Project)
·
The Utah
Middle School Math Project (University of Utah Middle School Math Project)
·
NYS Common Core ELA Curriculum
(Expeditionary Learning)
·
NYS Common Core ELA & Literacy
Curriculum (Public Consulting Group)
·
Core Knowledge Language Arts (Core
Knowledge Foundation)
·
Integrated Science: 2014-15 or
2015-16 (Utah State Office of Education)
·
Science: 2015-16 or 2016-17 (Utah
State Office of Education)
·
Biology: 2015-16 or 2016-17 (Utah
State Office of Education)
·
Chemistry 2015-16 or 2016-17 (Utah
State Office of Education)
·
Earth Science 2015-16 or 2016-17
(Utah State Office of Education)
·
Physics 2015-16 or 2016-17 (Utah
State Office of Education)
For each of these products, respondents noted if they were aware of OER, if
they had included it for active consideration as part of a curricula selection
process, or if they had adopted it. The overall level of awareness (combining
those who adopted, considered, or were aware of a product) ranges from a high
of just over 50% to under 10%, depending on the specific product.
Eureka Math Great Minds is both the best known and most
widely adopted of these OER alternatives. The two New York State English
Language Arts options and the Core Knowledge Language Arts products have
somewhat lower overall levels of awareness, with much lower consideration and
adoption rates. The three Secondary Math alternatives show very similar
results, with lower rates of awareness and consideration. The seven Utah State
options follow behind, with overall levels of awareness ranging from 15% to
just under 10%.
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While the individual adoption levels are all in the single digits (with the
exception of the Great Minds Math), these numbers do represent a considerable
level of overall awareness of OER K-12 curricula materials. Two-thirds of all
respondents reported that they were aware of at least one of the OER materials,
with 21% saying that they had included at least one such product for active
consideration in a curriculum decision process. The 16% overall adoption rate
is only slightly higher than the adoption rate for Great Minds Math at 12%,
meaning that only 4% of districts have made an OER adoption decision that does
not include Great Minds Math.
METHODOLOGY
This study of the K–12
curriculum adoption process used descriptive analysis relying extensively on a
survey instrument designed specifically for the project. The instrument was
patterned after similar instruments used by the Babson Survey Research Group to
study textbook adoption among higher education faculty and use of online and
blended learning among U.S. K-12 districts.
The “universe of
interest” for this study is composed of all public school districts in the
United States that operate schools. Information on these districts was taken
from the Common Core of Data (CCD) from the U.S. Department of Education's
National Center for Education Statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/ccd/ccddata.asp).
The study used three
survey submission processes:
·
An email invitation was sent
to randomly selected school districts using a commercial source for email
addresses. A reminder email message was sent two weeks after the first
message. Both the invitation and the reminder message contained a unique URL
that, when clicked, would open up the survey form in a web browser and pass the
unique survey ID.
·
Additional randomly-selected
school districts were sent a paper copy of the invitation along with a paper
copy of the survey form. The invitation and survey form each contained a
survey activation code and a URL for submission, that, when entered, would open
up the survey form in a web browser.
·
Schools districts receiving
the paper-based invitation also had the option to complete the paper survey
form and submit using an included postage-paid business reply envelope.
All potential
respondents were informed of the funding source for the study (The
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation), and who
was conducting it (“researchers at Babson Survey Research Group”). They were
also told the following: “All survey respondents are provided complete
anonymity, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation does not see
individual-level results. No personally identifiable information is
released.”
Analysis for this
report includes responses from 584 K-12 school districts. These responses
represent 48 states and the District of Columbia. The average number of
students for the reporting districts was 6,278, with the overall sample
accounting for 3,490,735 students.
The survey form was
composed of two portions: one that applied to all respondents, and a second
section to be completed only by those districts that had made a full-course
curriculum decision in Mathematics, English Language Arts, Science, or
History and Social Studies over the previous three years. The invitation letter and the survey form itself were carefully
worded to encourage responses from all school district representatives,
regardless of whether they had recently made such a decision or not.
All data collected were
entered into an online database, either directly by the respondent or, in the
case of paper-based responses, by the researchers. Each entry included the
unique survey ID number that was used to link the response to the description
data of that school district contained in the Education's National Center for
Education Statistics Common Core of Data. The data linked from this source
included location information (city, town, state, urban/rural), the grade range
in the district, the number of students in the district, and the number of
teachers in the district.
As noted in previous
BSRG reports, a critical issue in measuring the level of OER awareness is
exactly how the question is worded. Many confuse “open” with “free,” and
assume all free resources are OER. Still others will confuse “open resources”
with “open source,” and assume OER refers only to open source software.
Because of these differing levels of understanding, the phrasing of the
awareness question needs to be specific. The version selected (listed
below) was found to have the best balance in differentiating among the
different levels of awareness, while avoiding leading those with no previous
knowledge of the concept.
How
aware are you of Open Educational Resources (OER)? OER is defined as
"teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public
domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that
permits their free use and re-purposing by others." Unlike traditionally
copyrighted material, these resources are available for "open" use,
which means users can edit, modify, customize, and share them.
I am not aware of OER
I have heard of OER, but don't know much about
them
I am somewhat aware of OER but I am not sure
how they can be used
I am aware of OER and some of their use cases
I am very aware of OER and know how they can
be used in the classroom
Based on our testing,
the results from this question may still slightly overstate the level of OER
awareness, but this was considered a better option than leading the
respondent. By using a series of additional questions, the results from this
question can be adjusted to remove those who might have thought that they were
aware of OER, but when probed did not have knowledge of all of the aspects that
make up the concept.
Because licensing for remixing and reuse is central to the
concept of OER, a question about the respondent’s awareness of different
licensing concepts was asked of all respondents before any questions
about OER awareness itself:
How
aware are you of each of the following licensing mechanisms?
|
|
Unaware
|
Somewhat
Aware
|
Aware
|
Very
Aware
|
|
Public
Domain
|
|
|
|
|
|
Copyright
|
|
|
|
|
|
Creative
Commons
|
|
|
|
|
By combining the responses from the OER awareness question
with those of the licensing questions, a combined index of awareness can be
constructed.
