Study introductions:

An observation arising from my teaching of the Biochemistry class is that students rarely possess personal copies of the textbook. Instead students reply heavily on teachers’ Powerpoint slides as the main source of course content which are not sufficient for their learning. This project aims to provide invaluable information about the impact of textbook on students’ learning experience and learning outcome. Using the classes of Biochemistry of 2016 and 2017 as the subject, an experimental approach is employed to study the power/benefit of textbook possession. A few copies of the Biochemistry textbook will be loaned to a portion of the class. Students’ learning experience will be assessed by surveys and their learning outcome, in terms of coursework and exam results, will be compared with that of previous years. This project is expected to provide hard evidence about the benefit of textbook access. The results could influence teachers’ choice of textbook and students’ decision on whether to purchase a textbook.

Objectives:

1. Understand student’s opinions and experiences on processing a hard copy of the textbook through entry/exit surveys.

2. Unravel the impact of textbook possession on learning experience.

3. Compare learning outcomes based on textbook possession.

Results:

Introduction to the study design

Survey design

2017 Class Survey results:
Before the course; After the course

2018 Class Survey results:
Before the course; After the course

Learning outcomes (to be added)

Discussions:

In general, students welcome having his/her own copy of textbook. Most people want a free copy of the textbook. However the actual usage of the textbook was not high. Positive feedbacks from the students were received for the participation of this study.

Not surprisingly, teachers’ PowerPoint slides are still students’ favorite source for knowledge and reference – this is a problem in my opinion.

Almost all students still will not buy a personal copy of the textbook.

In addition to the intended outcome of this study, which is the knowledge about the impact of textbook on a course, the students’ learning experiences were enhanced by the opportunity of accessing to textbooks, offered by this study.

Selected remarks from students:

"Really want!" ...the textbook

"Those who disagrees usefulnessn of textbook mostly think textbooks are difficult to understand"

"Textbook is useful, the problem is that I'm too busy preparing other courses, thus having no time to read it."

"Better to have a free e-textbook"

"Too big"

Acknowledgements:

My sincere thanks to all the students in Biochemistry class (BMS2003) 2017 and 2018! Daniel Lai Hong SO (Applied Biology) and Dan For Fa CHAN (Applied Biology) assisted me on this study.