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Although accounting professors around the globe have addressed various social aspects of accounting, very rarely does that research address the concerns of students. This is despite the fact that students are the focus of the educational mission of most universities. In an effort to address this gap, this chapter extends the field of social accounting to an issue critical to students: the cost of accounting textbooks in the United States. Textbook cost is drawing increasing attention from public interest groups and government regulators as costs are growing at a more rapid rate than many other costs, and constitute a significant portion of the total cost of obtaining a higher education degree. For accounting students, these costs are exacerbated by the fact that accounting textbooks are among the most expensive of any major, and they are being revised with increasing frequency – which eliminates students’ ability to buy less expensive used books – often with little or no discernible benefit to students. We argue that in some subfields of accounting – especially managerial/cost and introductory courses – topics are relatively stable, and that frequent textbook revisions are unnecessarily costly for our students, many of whom, along with their families, are making significant financial sacrifices to earn their degrees. In this study, we provide background on the textbook pricing issue, include data from a survey of accounting faculty demonstrating that they consider the revisions too frequent, document the increasing frequency of accounting textbook revisions over recent decades, analyze content in a leading accounting textbook, and discuss options for reducing the cost of accounting textbooks, including following student activists’ lead in advocating for open-source, free textbooks.

In this chapter we report findings from a quantitative and qualitative pilot study of students from a single university setting in the northeastern United States. The majority of participants were enrolled in either face-to-face or online sections of a business course in organizational behavior, and the textbook modality included both open (PDF) and proprietary (CourseSmart) digital formats. The key research questions focus on the degree to which students feel satisfied with electronic textbooks (e-textbooks). We also explore correlates of students’ satisfaction and their positive attitudes regarding the functionality of the use of e-textbooks by examining the impact of prior coursework and students’ concurrent use of other Internet sites, e.g., social media networks, while reading e-textbooks. Specifically, we explore the extent to which students’ positive attitudes toward the functionality of e-textbook use is sufficient to result in students’ engagement. Engagement is measured via their intentions to buy additional e-textbooks in the future, their course grades, and their perceptions of comprehension of the material over time. Students’ overall satisfaction with the e-textbook is likewise explored to determine impact on the same measures of engagement.

This chapter examines the processes of rewriting nationhood in educational narratives regarding the Second World War (WWII) in Poland. Using mixed methods, this case study analyzes narrative change in state-approved history textbooks published between 1977 and 2008, thus covering the period of political transition from a communist to a democratic Poland. Although trends in learning theory and international norms suggest that attention to diversity should have increased in textbooks, in Poland these trends have been subsumed by more long-lasting Polish specific cultural tropes. WWII narratives, in particular, emphasize an ethnically homogeneous nation. Throughout the 31-year sample, educating youth about WWII in Poland continues to be focused on reclaiming “Polishness” rather than on espousing global understandings and citizenship.

Consistent with international trends, various policy initiatives have been proposed in South Africa to reform education practices and equip learners with the ability to become critical-thinking citizens. One such reform was the inclusion of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) as a subject in the curriculum in the late 1990s. EMS, a uniquely South African creation, was introduced to address a particular agenda, enabling learners to understand the wealth creation process and develop entrepreneurial dispositions. Accordingly, the programmed curriculum evident in the EMS textbooks was designed to meet these official curriculum objectives that would create an entrepreneurial culture, which, in turn, would stimulate economic growth. Considering that textbooks are carriers of more than content information and reflect specific values and ideologies, it is of particular importance to examine these textbooks and the messaging communicated to young people about entrepreneurs, as these adolescents themselves start forming their own identities.

Entrepreneurship education has had a remarkable evolution over time and the number of entrepreneurship textbooks has multiplied given the increased interest in entrepreneurship programs in higher education. Yet, studies that review the coverage of textbooks focusing on entrepreneurship are scarce. This study provides an inventory of entrepreneurship textbooks and the topics they cover as well as specific emerging topics they do not cover by analyzing the content of 57 textbooks. Our results suggest that most textbooks provide significant coverage of such topics as the nature of entrepreneurship, business plans, financing, marketing, and cases. Among emerging concepts, social media has been relatively well covered with increasing coverage in more recent textbooks, while business canvas, as an example of alternatives to conventional business plans, is rarely covered. Most textbooks have provided little coverage of such topics as sales, family business, women and minorities, as well as ethics and sustainability. This study not only reveals areas that are covered by existing textbooks but also themes that future textbooks and research could cover to address the challenges of future entrepreneurship education.

For the past several years, libraries have been evolving. The traditional academic library housed print collections and provided space for studying, usually quiet space. With the advances in technology, libraries have had their own metamorphosis. No longer are they constrained by a physical space – they now have virtual spaces, which include virtual collections.

During this same time, the cost of higher education and textbooks has been on the rise. Universities and the federal government have enacted policies and laws in an effort to combat these rising costs. In support of the students and affordable textbook initiatives, libraries have become partners in helping lower the cost of textbooks for students through either purchasing them electronically or other means, such as course reserves. Indeed, a single library purchase can now provide course materials for an entire class.

This chapter will present an overview of the Affordable Learning Georgia Initiative and how the Georgia Tech Library has updated their collection development policies to support this initiative.

This study examines 117 verbs associated with 2,872 learning objectives, and 377 questions taken from 24 textbooks across the accounting curriculum. To determine the level of cognitive ability associated with the individual learning objectives I analyzed the verbs based upon Bloom's Taxonomy. To reach across the accounting curriculum I chose texts from Financial Accounting, Intermediate Financial Accounting, Advanced Financial Accounting, Managerial Accounting, Cost Accounting, and Auditing. Results of the analysis found that the authors used verbs at the lower learning levels of the cognitive domain. The verbs used by the author teams depend upon individual preference rather a specific segment of the cognitive domain. In addition, as the student progresses through the accounting curriculum some topics in upper level textbooks use learning objectives at the same level as in introductory level textbooks.

To demonstrate how teacher candidate narratives in response to videos depicting science and literacy instruction can be used to both teach and evaluate beginning teachers’ emerging conceptions of disciplinary literacy.

Teacher candidates viewed and responded to videos depicting exemplary practice in science education and then videos of their own practice. Qualitative discourse analysis was used to investigate the science teacher candidates’ interpretations of problems of practice, their views of scientific literacy and understandings of their students.

The teacher candidates displayed distaste for textbooks, reinforced by negative experiences with textbooks in school settings, and yet they viewed textbooks as essential for effectively teaching knowledge about science. At the same time, each viewed the natural world as the ideal “text” for teaching knowledge about science, at times compensating for the weaknesses of textbooks and at other times entirely replacing textbooks as the source of knowledge about science. We consider what this means for preparing teachers for effective subject matter and literacy practice.

Video reflections like these demonstrate that what teacher candidates understand about video representations of others’ and their own teaching are far from literal and are interpreted through the educational and background lenses of the teacher candidates’ themselves. We suggest that a great deal more work needs to be done to better understand how to use video reflection to best develop teacher candidates’ conceptions of subject matter and literacy practice.

This chapter focuses on a university case that interprets the variability of academic freedom in terms of faculty’s textbook selection and the need for students’ textbook affordability. Faculty members are participants in a collective bargaining unit and students are members of the student government organization in a state university system. The faculty contract outlines tenets of academic freedom that delineate faculty selection of curriculum (textbooks), instruction, and assessment practices. This chapter highlights the nuances of faculty rights in the name of academic freedom and the students’ need for more affordable textbooks which includes open educational resource materials. In this case, the administration, faculty association, and the student government worked together to create a set of conditions for a more affordable textbook selection. This collaborative process is explored and explained as a set of practices that other colleges and universities can replicate at their institutions.