#Textbookbroke: Findings of a University of Guelph student survey on textbook purchasing behaviours and outcomes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The high cost of commercial textbooks creates financial burdens for many post-secondary students. There have been a number of recent studies exploring the link between high textbook costs and negative outcomes for students. The 2014 publication "Fixing the Broken Textbook Market" by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) reported that in the past decade, "textbook prices have increased by 82%" and that "...textbooks remain one of the largest out of pocket expenses for students and families – meaning that high price tags are yet another threat to affordability and accessibility of education in the United States."1 Surveys conducted in 2010, 2012, and 2016 by the Florida Virtual Campus found that "the high cost of textbooks is negatively impacting student access, success and completion."2 Student groups across Canada have initiated #TextbookBroke campaigns to draw attention to the challenges these trends are creating for students. In addition to rising textbook prices, student groups have pointed out that publishing industry practices such as the bundling of content, the use of access codes, and the frequent updating of textbook editions, have virtually eliminated the used textbook market.3 Students are left with few options when it comes to obtaining affordable course materials. In order to find out whether these same issues were affecting University of Guelph students, the Library partnered with the University’s Central Student Association (CSA) in the fall of 2016 to survey undergraduate students about their textbook purchasing behaviours. The goals of the UG Student Textbook survey (referred to as the #TextbookBroke survey) were to determine whether textbook and course material affordability was an issue on the Guelph campus, and if so, how UG students were affected by it. The survey was sent out just after students had completed their textbook-purchasing decision-making for the semester. The University of Guelph has an undergraduate population of approximately 23,000 and more than 4,000 of these students responded to the survey. Some 3,200 responses also included written comments.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".