Open AccessUndesirable Difficulties: Investigating Barriers to Students’ Learning with Ebooks in a Semester-length Course
Author(s) -
Cindy Pierard,
Vanessa Svihla,
Susanne Clement,
Bing-Shan Fazio
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
college and research libraries
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.886
H-Index - 52
eISSN - 2150-6701
pISSN - 0010-0870
DOI - 10.5860/crl.81.2.170
Subject(s) - affordance , medical education , mathematics education , graduate students , psychology , cohort , computer science , pedagogy , medicine , human–computer interaction
Our ability to make informed decisions about ebooks is constrained by our limited understanding of how students perceive and use them. A team of librarians and a professor in learning sciences asked graduate students to serve as informants on student experience with ebooks. We analyzed student work in two semester-long studies, focusing on barriers and affordances they identified. In the first cohort, students who chose to explore ebooks uncovered affordances. In the second cohort, student comfort levels with PDF formats increased, while comfort with ebooks decreased. We discuss strategies for minimizing challenges and increasing desirable difficulties to support ebooks as learning tools.
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