OER and Student Success - OER Success at John Jay

Of students who leave college, 38 percent do so due to financial concerns while 28 percent drop out because they do not meet the institution’s academic expectations (Parker, 2023).
OER were found to predict improvements in pass rates for students (Smith et al., 2020).
DFW rates were significantly lower in courses using OER (Colvard et al., 2018).
OER appear to “lessen the negative relationship between course difficulty and final grades” (Fischer et al., 2021, p. 18).
In some contexts, students taking a course load that included OER courses accumulated more course credits than students who did not take any courses using OER (Griffiths et al., 2020), thus accelerating time to degree.

Textbook cost has an impact on student stress levels as well as on student behavior and academic
performance at varying rates for different student subpopulations (Jenkins et al., 2020).
This impact is more profound for first-generation students, students receiving financial aid, and Latinx
students (Jenkins et al., 2020).
Textbook costs disproportionately impact low-income students, students of color, and first-generation
students, and the adoption of OER can help alleviate these key disparities and create a more inclusive
learning environment (Jenkins et al., 2020; Stanberry, 2022).
For a variety of student demographics, OER positively impact key outcomes, including failure rates and
final grades (Colvard et al., 2018; Marsh et al., 2022; Smith et al., 2020).
When OER replace traditional textbooks, performance gaps between subgroups of interest tend to be
diminished, resulting in more equitable end-of-course grade outcomes (Colvard et al., 2018).

Reference:
AAC&U. (2023). Making the Case for Open Educational Resources.