COST

“I think everyone agrees with me when I say that texts are ridiculously expensive especially for the rare times they are used. Even when I do use a book in class, it has never been everyday. I get that they are sometimes very useful, but when you do not have much money to begin with, it's extremely frustrating to spend $500 on books that will barely be used.”  --Anonymous First-Year Student

“...my Spanish book was $300 and has almost no resale value.” --Anonymous First-Year Student

A few weeks into my last semester in a Literature M.A. program, I had the small misfortune of having my car broken into, my textbooks stolen.  My laptop was stolen too, but thanks to the fact that I use cloud storage with some consistency and only lost my most recent days of work, the initial trauma of the need to do work over again after the laptop theivery was overshadowed by the loss of the textbooks.  The textbooks that were stolen for one class were worth over $70, and now I had to purchase them again!

Having to purchase these texts twice put the cost of this class in course materials at the same price I paid for the replacement laptop.  I bemoaned the fact that I would have to repurchase material I had once had, needed these texts as quickly as possible, and that only 2 of the 3 texts I need to repurchase had e-books available.

These annoyances were allayed by the facts that I actually wanted to  possess the information in the lost textbooks: Jones and Hafner’s Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction, Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues, and The Digital Divide: Arguments for and against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking. These texts are relevant to my work and my research beyond the classroom and I have kind colleagues in my large shared office that are studying in the same courses and willing to share (thanks Allison, Will, and Mav!)--all in all, I would expect I had a better relationship to these textbooks than many other students.  

Following a survey, performed by the three contributors to this blog, of a sample of 80 of the 1,275 member class of 2018 regarding their practices with course materials and other kinds of texts (like digital streaming services), the idea that my relationship to textbooks was better than many students might seems like an understatement.

This survey, the methods of which are extensively described here, produced some particularly interesting results when viewed through the lens of costs.  First, the results of the some of the survey questions in the pure--then, I will offer some analysis through the framework of cost.  

When asked about their practices of reviewing course texts beyond the semester and returning course texts at the end of the semester, students reported low likelihood of returning to their course texts for information (or other use) and high likelihood of returning them to the store (or elsewhere) for some cash.  Figures 1 and 2 summarize the student responses to these questions.

Figure 1: Students’ predicted likelihood of returning to course texts beyond the semester and predicted practices of textbook return

Figure 2: Students' predictions regarding the number of texts they will reuse following the semester

Finding it likely that you will review or reuse your course texts in any way appears to be a fairly rare--less than 20% of students reported that they anticipate it as likely that they will do so. In fact, the number of students that anticipate getting rid of all texts without consideration of whether or not they will get money for them is higher (26.3% of respondents) than the number of students who anticipate using their books again (16.3%)!  

Our finding that just over a quarter of students surveyed anticipate getting rid of all of their texts at the end of the semester without concern for recuperating cost bears discussion.  It is especially significant because these students are in their second semester and have some ideas about and reflections on their practices in and after their first college semester.

 This desire to rid themselves of texts may be an expression of a lack of financial need on the part of this fourth of the student population, but it’s likely that something more complex is going on here.  We may be seeing a disengagement with traditional course methods on the terms of students’ “digital nativism” to work with Marc Prensky’s language in his piece, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.”

This disengagement from course texts is something that will be explored more in our post on “Engagement”--but it is worth considering that it is happening on the terms of cost and beyond the terms of cost.  Prensky makes a wide argument about watershed changes in students attitudes that goes beyond the terms of cost, but we might gain something by bringing digital practices of payment into consideration.  Prensky argues of digital natives, a category that his 2001 piece places students into and we might place our students in now: “Students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a ‘singularity’ – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called ‘singularity’ is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.”

We might read students practices with their course materials as a “really big discontinuity” from the standpoint of the print native or the digital immigrant.  This becomes especially significant when viewed through the lens of cost.  After reviewing the cost of materials for all of the sections of the second-semester composition course at our university, a class that is required of all freshman and combines literary study with writing instruction, we might begin to quantify exactly how significant this discontinuity is.  Even though this course runs for a relatively low average cost, we are seeing an overwhelming student attitude toward texts that demonstrates disengagement from the value of texts.

The rationale and methodology of this study and its full results are available.  But one of its most significant findings is that, assuming full enrollment in each of the 47 sections (a fair assumption, because in accounting for 22 students a class that total comes in at 1,034, which is less than the total freshman class size) the total cost of books for these courses is HUGE.  We are talking higher than a year’s tuition huge.  The total course of course materials, when calculated at the list price of purchase (as described in the linked methodology) is a whopping $59,062.74!  This is significant when we consider students are not returning to these texts after the semester and one of the main course objectives of this course is to get students to engage with literary texts.

This number seems like small change, when compared to the total cost of the two required texts for the first semester composition class, Everything’s an Argument and Quick Access Brief. The costs of those texts when multiplied by the number of incoming freshman puts the total cost of course texts for the Fall semester at $130,050.  And that is the price when considering the list price of the abridged edition of Everything’s an Argument!

With such high costs, the average individual text in these composition and literature classes weighs in at $20.14 and the average total materials cost is $57.14. Sure, composition and literature classes are likely cheaper overall than science classes or other courses with truly expensive textbooks. But seeing that most students find it unlikely or somewhat unlikely that they will return to books, we might think students are looking to recuperate monetary value from their texts after the semester more than they are looking to find educational value in them beyond the semester. From there, we might wonder what students’ sense of the value in these texts during the semester.

From the student reflection quoted at the beginning at this blog that puts forth their sense that usage is “rare” and certainly not “everyday,” we might wonder how this is possible that students are rarely using their texts and if there are ways to help students value course materials.

Here, as instructors, we might hear a call to reconsider our material practices in the first year writing classroom.  We would like to use what we have learned from the syllabus study to make a few suggestions.  

1. Engage in conversations about students’ practices with course texts and instructor expectations. Recent research, performed by Sung Wook Ji, Sherri Michaels, and David Waterman in their study “Print vs. Electronic Readings: Cost Efficiency and Perceived Learning” found significant cost advantages in electronic readings, as well as a student preference for electronic readings. At the same time, these researchers did find that students (about ⅔ of them) did choose to incur costs by printing electronic readings.  What is clear is that students practices with course materials are complex--complex enough to make us wonder about their status as digital natives--as teachers, we should figure out how to account for their practices.
2. Include clear course policies about reading practices in syllabi. In our syllabus study, we identified very few sections of the course that engaged a conversation about editions and formats of course texts.  While many syllabi list course texts by ISBN, very few discussed whether these editions were required or if other editions were allowable.  Only one single section directly and explicitly had a policy on e-books.
3. Consider allowing students to use editions of texts in the public domain. Many sections of the courses studied are using texts old enough to be in the public domain.  No sections’ syllabi contain a reference to the fact that their texts are or may be available online for free.  It seems that this is a significant missed opportunity for fostering potential engagement with literature beyond the semester, for “online for free” is a material practice that pulls digital natives in.

These suggestions work to respond to and intervene what we have learned from students’ reported practices and bring them to accord with the practices we encourage as instructors.

ENGAGEMENT

"Streaming video actually helps me do work, though I'm not really paying attention to the video it makes homework less tedious."--Anonymous FYW Student

"Requiring streamed video services as compared to course texts would be much more engaging/ a cheaper options for students." --Anonymous FYW Student

Many things compete for college students’ attention. Full-time students take 4 to 6 classes. Between these classes, these students are dealing with dozens of learning objectives.  The class we (the blog contributors) teach in the Fall semester has 13 discrete learning objectives in four different categories (Critical Thinking, Rhetorical Knowledge, Processes and Conventions, and Research and Ethics). The class we teach in the Spring has the incrementally more manageable 12 learning objectives in three different categories (Knowledge of Literature, Processes and Convention, and Research Writing Skills). Between working toward fulfilling these objectives and working to complete more tangible assignments and sit exams, students have their academic attention pulled in many directions.  

And that is as if students only have coursework to consider as they engage with the world as young adults, between staking out a life in relation to others, their communities, and the world, students have their plates full. It is a popular and academic commonplace that we moderns, and particularly the contemporary student, have filled our plates with information and technology.  

Jones and Hafner put it well in their second chapter of Understanding Digital Literacies, "Information Everywhere," when they challenge this assumption that our contemporary world suffers from "information overload" (19) by clarifying the difference between information and data. Data is the "facts" of reality, including sensory input, and information is usable data, when information becomes usable, applicable, and actionable, it is knowledge (20).  

Thus, technologies and pedagogies should enable us to sift through and use data, giving rise to information and knowledge. One means for sifting through the massive amount of data that we present in class, through lectures, PowerPoints, and the like, and that students generate together in class, through things like groupwork and writing activities, is offering clear course learning outcomes. 

We hope that we achieve these learning outcomes and they become knowledge, and the syllabus is our way of making clear and supporting these objectives and the classroom practices we believe will best move students toward being able to use the information they discover and skills they achieve as knowledge.

Sifting through syllabi to gain a better understanding of cost and material practices in the classroom to aid us in thinking about using digital texts as the main literary texts in the composition classroom, we noticed that course policies were far more likely to regulate the "attention economy" of the classroom, to borrow Jones and Hafner's term from their sixth chapter ("Attention Structures"), than they are to regulate the material economy of the classroom for its own sake.  

Many syllabi do not make explicit whether the course requires print or web submission of papers, the vast majority of syllabi do not contain thorough technology policies. We found that it was extremely infrequent that course materials policies discussed the use of digital technology in the classroom for reading course texts (while all classes required significant reading), only two syllabi mention reading practices and digital technology. Many more syllabi mandated student printing of course readings, so print technologies of reading were more frequently mentioned and regulated.  Several syllabi explicitly state that students must bring their course texts everyday and offer specific sanctions, but where the texts are purchased rather than printed from the course website, the course policies to not specify what forms of texts are acceptable (i.e. e-book policies are not made direct). When the course policies did mention digital technologies, it was to either permit their use for writing and note-taking, or as one syllabus referred to it as "educational use" of digital technologies, or to expressedly ban or regulate their use.

The most frequent technology policy was to ban cellphone use in the classroom. Only two instructors mention cellphones to permit them for "educational use" while many expressly mention them to ban them. These statements are frequently accompanied with grade penalties, attention grabbing formatting, and possibilities like getting ejected from the classroom. It is clear that when policies are regulating cell phone use in the classroom with such fervor, they overgo material concerns and move into attempting to regulate student attention and where it is paid. Some policies mention practices that are banned (and we might ask ourselves after Foucault's repressive hypothesis if this is a good idea), like "browsing the Web" and "checking Facebook" and most often the dreaded "texting."

More than the concern that these restrictions might actually engender the behavior they attempt to repress, these policies show a marked preference for deep- over hyper-attentive methods. This is likely no surprise when we think about the training of most FYW teachers in humanistic methods and methodologies. N. Katherine Hayles notes in her piece "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine" this focus on deep attention in literary studies is one of the factors and problems behind her observation that literary scholars have not been able to address our contemporary decline in reading skills. She writes "While literary studies continues to teach close reading to students, it does less well in exploiting the trend toward the digital. Students read incessantly in digital media and write in it as well, but only infrequently are they encouraged to do so in literature classes or in environments that encourage the transfer of print reading abilities to digital and vice versa. The two tracks, print and digital, run side by side, but messages from either track do not leap across to the other side" (63). 

It seems that if we are to address what has been read as a contemporary decline in reading skills, one way that we might do so is by having candid conversations with our students about their reading practices. We can initiate these in our own course policies by justifying our choices of certain editions of texts and modes of reading or expressly allowing digital editions and modes of reading. We can have conversations about how we read and what students get out of close reading and deep attention.  

Taking about what deep attention does and what we can get out of cultivating this kind of attention and our close reading skills appears to be a way that may help students understand the value of these course policies that centralize attention in course texts (implicitly print ones) and maybe even branch into conversations about negotiating and moving between deep and hyper attention, between close and hyper reading. These conversations should start with the syllabus.

Initiating these conversations may be a first step in moving students toward a place where they can use their hyper attentive skills to make deep reading more fun, or as the student quoted at the beginning of this piece might say, "less tedious." Clay Shirki (in his How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World) believes that capitalizing on the cognitive surplus, for social and individual advancement, requires these generative activities to be fun. As teachers, we might ask ourselves how we can help our students thing about the cognitive activities required for our courses in this way.