Relevant literature concerning this topic can be divided into the following topics:
These previous studies offer an extensive look into the issues around textbook content and biases, as well as how those problems can affect student perception and performance. However, they focus on specific topics, such as race or gender, or OER-related outcomes in specific disciplines. This study, therefore, aims to contribute to existing literature by providing a comparison of content in OER versus traditional textbooks in Sociology and Anthropology – something that has not been accomplished. In addition, this study aims to inspect textbook quality and how it ties into pedagogical practice, which has not been analyzed in previous studies. This analysis of the discussion on the similarities and differences between OER and standard textbooks in Sociology and Anthropology is useful for understanding quality in relation to case adoption. At Gettysburg College, librarians in the Scholarly Communications office have been working on multiple projects to expose additional faculty members to the world of open-access materials as a way to alleviate students’ financial burden of buying textbooks (Appedu et al. 2020). My research can provide additional data and analysis to aid this work.