Explore the vast range of titles available.

Education systems and textbooks in selected countries of the Middle East are increasingly the subject of debate. This volume presents and analyzes the major trends as well as the scope and the limits of education reform initiatives undertaken in recent years. In curricula and teaching materials, representations of the \"Self\" and the \"Other\" offer insights into the contemporary dynamics of identity politics. By building on a network of scholars working in various countries in the Middle East itself, this book aims to contribute to the evolution of a field of comparative education studies in this region.

This paper presents a survey study aiming to systematically examine, analyse and review relevant research focusing on mathematics textbooks and hence identify future directions in this field of research. The literature surveyed is selected from different data sources, including mainly journal articles, research theses and conference proceedings. The survey revealed that important progress has been made over the last few decades in mathematics textbook research, though the major achievement has been concentrated in the areas of textbook analysis (including textbook comparison), and the use of textbooks in teaching and learning. It is overall no longer true that the textbook research in mathematics is “scattered, inconclusive, and often trivial” as described six decades ago; however, the development of research on mathematics textbooks has been unbalanced in different areas. Following the review and discussion, the paper proposes five needed directions for advancing the research in this field.

Open textbooks, freely available open educational resources, have an ever-growing presence in learning environments around the world, though detailed studies of their development are rare. The challenges of tracking textbook writing activity in a precise manner over time may account for this sparsity. To highlight how process-tracing research can contribute insight to the textbook development literature, particularly that focused on open textbook writing, this study addresses the roles that think-aloud protocols (TAPs) played during the construction of an open corequisite writing textbook. The volume, which was designed with underprepared university students in mind, stresses the growth of academic and workplace writing skills together with effective study techniques, and its two novice coursebook authors used self-recorded concurrent verbalization and interviews to document its creation. By analyzing the data collected via means of qualitative content analysis, they found that concurrent verbalization exposed actual textbook writing behaviors, logged instances of metacognitive awareness, and documented project reflections, and herein they frame TAPs as spaces abundant with opportunities to view reflexivity (reflective practice) and learning during open textbook production. The research evidences the various functions concurrent verbalization may serve in process-tracing studies of textbook writing and demonstrates that the method can be deployed in flexible ways to address research objectives and make progress on writing projects that demand considerable time and focus. It also explains the advantages of collecting TAP data over successive writing sessions to detect reflexivity during materials development. Plain Language Summary Thinking aloud as a Way to Prompt Reflection on Practice While Creating an Open Textbook Concurrent verbalization is a method that can be used to gather information about research participants’ thoughts as they carry out activities. During a concurrent verbalization session, a participant thinks aloud, and what they say is recorded so that it can be examined to address a study’s objectives. In the research project described in this paper, the authors used concurrent verbalization along with interviews to communicate their thoughts as they wrote an open (freely available) textbook for underprepared university students looking to improve their writing and study skills. They sought to track their writing processes in detail to increase understanding of how open textbooks are created since few such studies exist. So, while writing chapters, the inexperienced textbook authors audio recorded themselves thinking aloud and then looked for relationships amongst points mentioned in the recorded and transcribed material. Prominent in this material was the notion that concurrent verbalization played different roles during the textbook’s creation, and that is the research focus addressed here. In particular, the method brought to light how the authors behaved while writing, how they reacted to thinking aloud as they wrote, and how they remarked on textbook content already composed. In doing so, concurrent verbalization offered opportunities for exploration of and reflection on writing practices, as well as chances to learn from those activities. The paper emphasizes that concurrent verbalization can perform different functions in studies that track writing processes, can be used in flexible ways to fulfill research and writing project aims, and can encourage writers to reflect on their practices.

This paper adopts a multimodal approach to the latest generation of digital mathematics textbooks (print and online) to investigate how the design, content, and features facilitate the construction of mathematical knowledge for teaching and learning purposes. The sequential organisation of the print version is compared to the interactive format of the online version which foregrounds explanations and important mathematical content while simultaneously ensuring a high level of connectivity and coherence across hierarchical layers of mathematical knowledge. For example, mathematical content in the online version is linked to definitions, theorems, examples and exercises that can be viewed in the original context in which the material was presented, and the content can also be linked to mathematics software. Significantly, the development process for the new generation of mathematics textbooks involves using a 'design neutral' markup language so that the books are simultaneously published as both print books and online books. In this development process, the structure of the chapters, sections, and subsections with their various elements are explicitly marked-up in the master document and preserved in the output format, giving rise to new methodologies for large-scale analysis of mathematics textbooks and student use of these books. For example, tracking methodologies and interactive visualisations of student viewings of online mathematical textbooks are identified as new research directions for investigating how students engage with mathematics textbooks within and across different educational contexts. [Author abstract]

Textbooks are a vital component in many higher education contexts. Increasing textbook prices, coupled with general rising costs of higher education have led some instructors to experiment with substituting open educational resources (OER) for commercial textbooks as their primary class curriculum. This article synthesizes the results of 16 studies that examine either (1) the influence of OER on student learning outcomes in higher education settings or (2) the perceptions of college students and instructors of OER. Results across multiple studies indicate that students generally achieve the same learning outcomes when OER are utilized and simultaneously save significant amounts of money. Studies across a variety of settings indicate that both students and faculty are generally positive regarding OER.