Digital library
Textbooks, references and open learning resources.
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Introductory Statistics
Barbara Illowsky; Susan Dean; Daniel Birmajer; Bryan Blount · OpenStax · 2023
Introductory Statistics 2e provides an engaging, practical, and thorough overview of the core concepts and skills taught in most one-semester statistics courses. The text focuses on diverse applications from a variety of fields and societal contexts, including business, healthcare, sciences, sociology, political science, computing, and several others. The material supports students with conceptual narratives, detailed step-by-step examples, and a wealth of illustrations, as well as collaborative exercises, technology integration problems, and statistics labs. The text assumes some knowledge of intermediate algebra, and includes thousands of problems and exercises that offer instructors and students ample opportunity to explore and reinforce useful statistical skills.
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Mental Disorders and the Criminal Justice System
Anne Nichol; Kendra Harding; Monica McKirdy · Open Oregon Educational Resources · 2025
This is an introductory textbook exploring the management and treatment of people with mental disorders throughout the criminal justice system.
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Introduction to Criminology: An Equity Lens
Jessica Peterson; Taryn VanderPyl · Open Oregon Educational Resources · 2025
Introduction to Criminology provides a foundation for understanding the origins, evolution, and current status of criminological theories. This textbook explains the field of criminology and influential theories in context, with real-life examples and activities. All content is delivered through a lens of equity, diversity, and inclusion. Each chapter includes bold-faced key terms with definitions and cross-references that link backward and forward to important concepts. Students can also engage with the content through discussion questions and supplemental resources at the end of each chapter.
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Torts: Cases, Principles, and Institutions
John Witt · CALI's eLangdell® Press · 2022
This is the Fifth Edition of Torts: Cases, Principles, and Institutions, a casebook for a one-semester torts course that carves out a distinctive niche in the field by focusing on the institutions and sociology of American tort law. The book retains many of the familiar features of the traditional casebook, including many of the classic cases. Like the best casebooks, it seeks to survey the theoretical principles underlying those cases. But it aims to supplement the cases and principles with editorial notes that focus students’ attention on the institutional features of our tort system, including features such as the pervasiveness of settlements, the significance of the market, the role of the plaintiff's bar, the importance of private insurance, the contingency fee, and the jury. These institutional arrangements are what make American tort law distinctive. They are how the substantive doctrines of tort law are translated into the practice of torts lawyers. And they are sociologically fascinating in their own right. TCPI integrates the institutional materials into the cases and notes rather than segregate them into separate sections of their own. It does so because its aim is not to teach the details of any one institution, such as the mechanics of the law of subrogation or workers’ compensation. Few one-semester torts classes can take up so much material. Instead, the book integrates the institutional material into the main text to draw general lessons about the massive, sprawling systems of private administration that American law has created under the umbrella of our torts system.
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Critical Perspectives on Technology and the Family
Susan Walker · University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing · 2022
From the perspective of a long time family practitioner, researcher, and educator, and technology innovator, this textbook offers the first comprehensive view of technology in the family for college students, professionals and the public. Each chapter offers content and a complete reference list, learning activities, ideas for critical blog posting and additional readings. The beginning chapters cover foundational information about our societal use of information and communications technology, family theories and ways of understanding families, and how families differ in their use and access to ICT. The main body of the book (chapters 4-10) covers elements of the family from couple relationships and dating apps, to children’s use and impacts on development from early childhood through young adulthood, use by parents and in the parent-child relationship, shared use by family members, and then topics important to family life: work-family balance and health and financial management and technology. The end of the book pivots to look closely at use by family professionals, the competencies needed to integrate technology into practice, and policy as a proactive and systemic avenue for change. End of book material include an additional reading list and recommended web content, social media and thought leaders. The authors lends her ideas on teaching for critical thinking with an overview at the beginning of the book, and classroom assessment ideas (actually short ways to engage learners in critical thinking activities).
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Applied Developmental Systems Science: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Theories, Meta-Theories, Methods, and Interventions but Didn't Realize You Needed to Ask. An Advanced Textbook
Ellen Skinner; Thomas Kindermann; Robert Roeser · Portland State University Library · 2015
This textbook provides a toolbox, a guidebook, and an instruction manual for researchers and interventionists who want to conceptualize and study applied problems from a developmental systems perspective, and for those who want to teach their graduate (or advanced undergraduate) students how to do this. It is designed to be useful to practitioners who focus on applied developmental problems, such as improving the important developmental contexts where people live, learn, and work, including the applied professions in education, social work, counseling, health care, community development, and business, all of which at their core are concerned with optimizing the development of their students, clients, patients, workers, citizens, and others whose lives they touch.
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Accessible Appalachia: An Open-Access Introduction to Appalachian Studies
Lisa Day; Jacob Johnson · Eastern Kentucky University · 2024
Accessible Appalachia: An Open-Access Introduction to Appalachian Studies is an edited collection of original scholarship. The textbook offers an interdisciplinary perspective and is ideal for introductory classes in Appalachian Studies. Available free to students everywhere, this textbook features coverage of Appalachian artistic, cultural, historical, natural, and social development.
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Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience
Joshua Farrington; Norman Powell; Gwendolyn Graham; Ogechi Anyanwu · Encompass Digital Archive · 2019
Slavery to Liberation: The African American Experience gives instructors, students, and general readers a comprehensive and up-to-date account of African Americans’ cultural and political history, economic development, artistic expressiveness, and religious and philosophical worldviews in a critical framework. It offers sound interdisciplinary analysis of selected historical and contemporary issues surrounding the origins and manifestations of White supremacy in the United States. By placing race at the center of the work, the book offers significant lessons for understanding the institutional marginalization of Blacks in contemporary America and their historical resistance and perseverance.
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Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood
Terry Rey · North Broad Press · 2024
Zombie Apocalypse: Holy Land, Haiti, Hollywood explores the intellectual and cultural histories of two highly influential and essentially religious ideas, that of the zombie and that of the apocalypse. The former is a modern idea rooted in Haitian Vodou and its popular African and European religious antecedents, while the latter is an ancient one rooted in Zoroastrianism and the Bible and widely expanded in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and is arguably one of the most influential ideas in world history. Today the merger of the zombie and the apocalypse has pervaded popular culture, with the zombie surpassing the vampire and Frankenstein as the most prolific monster in popular American consciousness. Drawing on biblical studies, African studies, Caribbean studies, and the sociology and history of religion, Parts I (Holy Land) and II (Haiti) explore the religious origins of these ideas. Part III (Hollywood) uses aspects of cultural studies, literary analysis, critical race theory, and cinema studies to document the (primarily) American obsession with the zombie and the zombie apocalypse. The apocalypse and the zombie have been momentous intellectual, historical, and cultural realities and social forces in both very ancient and very recent human history and culture. As such, Zombie Apocalypse provides a focused analysis of certain fundamental aspects of human existence. It challenges readers to cultivate their critical thinking skills while learning about two of the most compelling notions in human religious history and the impact they continue to have.
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A Theory of Literate Action: Literate Action
Charles Bazerman · WAC Clearinghouse · 2013
The second in a two-volume set, A Theory of Literate Action draws on work from the social sciences—and in particular sociocultural psychology, phenomenological sociology, and the pragmatic tradition of social science—to "reconceive rhetoric fundamentally around the problems of written communication rather than around rhetoric's founding concerns of high stakes, agonistic, oral public persuasion" (p. 3). An expression of more than a quarter-century of reflection and scholarly inquiry, this volume represents a significant contribution to contemporary rhetorical theory.
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Genre in a Changing World
Charles Bazerman; Adair Bonini; Débora Figueiredo · WAC Clearinghouse · 2009
Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions and educational settings. Genre in a Changing World,edited by Charles Bazerman, Adair Bonini, and Débora Figueiredo,provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, North and South America, were selected from more than 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies), held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007—the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.
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Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Social Justice
Kevin Adams; Murray Anderson; Elissah Becknell; CJ Ivory · Association of College and Research Libraries · 2022
As so often is the case, the idea for this book came from a twisting path. Not long after we began collaborating and presenting together at conferences, we were invited to draft a chapter on critical race theory (CRT) in academic libraries. An invited chapter is, of course, very flattering, so we proceeded without much thought to who the publisher would be. Angela had been working on social justice issues for a while at that point, while CJ had a wealth of expertise on open educational resources (OER). We merged our two areas of expertise in drafting that chapter, discussing OER as an opportunity to not only save students money but incorporate CRT into the curriculum—both in content and in practice. We submitted the final draft and were dismayed when we received the publication agreement. The publisher was unwilling to allow us to retain the copyright, even after we shared the licensing agreement that the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Press uses as an example. In discussing how to proceed—should we submit this chapter somewhere else?—we realized that we were really excited about extending the discussion of OER beyond just ensuring that all students can afford to access their course materials. So we pitched the idea of an edited volume on this topic to a publisher that we know has publishing practices we support (chapter authors retain copyright and select the Creative Commons license they prefer for their work), and here we are! Our entrance to academic work on social justice was through a focus on CRT. We outline this background here but wish to emphasize that it explicitly addresses only one aspect of social justice. For us, the structural understanding of racism in the United States creates a foundation upon which to understand other structures of oppression as well as intersectionality.
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Parenting and Family Diversity Issues
Diana Lang · Iowa State University · 2020
This book has been created for students and all individuals who work with children and families (e.g., educators, parents, caregivers, direct support workers, etc.) in diverse contexts. It is imperative to understand how and what factors may influence child outcomes across the lifespan. Therefore, key concepts related to parenting, child-rearing, care-giving, and parenting education are outlined in this textbook to provide historical, theoretical, and practical perspectives across vast settings and developmental domains.
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Instruction in Functional Assessment
Marcie Desrochers; Moira Fallon · Open SUNY · 2014
Instruction in Functional Assessment introduces learners to functional assessment (FA), which includes a variety of assessment approaches (indirect, observational, and experimental) for identifying the cause of an individual's challenging behavior for the purpose of designing effective treatments. FA is mandated by federal law and is a recognized empirically based approach to treatment of individuals with challenging behaviors (e.g., disruptive, self-injurious, and aggressive behaviors). Instruction in FA is essential for students who will one day enter professions as educators, psychologists, social workers, counselors, or mental health professionals. The purpose of this textbook is to provide instruction in FA skills for pre-professionals in the fields of education and psychology. This supplemental resource provides the context, background, and knowledge to facilitate students' acquisition of the methods, decision-making, and skills involved in conducting FA. Each chapter begins with focus questions designed to promote reflective thinking and ends with discussion questions. To promote application of FA in diverse situations and teach important lessons, case studies of individuals with challenging behaviors, interactive activities, and opportunities for practice are embedded in the chapters. Moreover, the text includes the ingredients to facilitate students' role play and rehearsal of appropriate FA skills while working in cooperative groups and using performance-based training.
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The Future is Now: Empowering Society Through AI Literacy
Jason Wrench; Sanae Elmoudden · Milne Open Textbooks · 2025
"The Future is Now: Empowering Society Through AI Literacy" aims to educate and empower a broad audience on the nuances of artificial intelligence, ensuring that readers are not only informed about what AI is and can do but are also prepared to engage with the technology ethically and responsibly. The book adopts a multidisciplinary approach, weaving together technical explanations, ethical considerations, and socio-economic insights to provide a comprehensive overview of AI's role in society today and its potential for the future.
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Fashion and Apparel Consumer Behavior
Andrea Niosi; Doreen Chung · Iowa State University Digital Press · 2025
This open textbook was designed for students studying apparel and fashion studies at an undergraduate level. It draws on the fields of marketing, business, communications, media studies, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. The book invites readers to examine the internal forces that shape consumer decision making, such as perceptions, motivations, personality, and attitudes as well as the external ones, such as social and situational influences, culture, and subcultures, especially those related to our appearances and clothing. This text centers the lived experiences of today’s consumers, specifically, undergraduate students. Following the original author, Andrea Niosi, the adapting author has also made efforts to decenter whiteness and dominant culture perspectives wherever possible to ensure a broader and more accurate representation of diverse consumers.
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Introductory Statistics 2e
Barbara Illowsky; Susan Dean; Daniel Birmajer; Bryan Blount · OpenStax, Rice University
Introductory Statistics 2e provides an engaging, practical, and thorough overview of the core concepts and skills taught in most one-semester statistics courses. The text focuses on diverse applications from a variety of fields and societal contexts, including business, healthcare, sciences, sociology, political science, computing, and several others. The material supports students with conceptual narratives, detailed step-by-step examples, and a wealth of illustrations, as well as collaborative exercises, technology integration problems, and statistics labs. The text assumes some knowledge of intermediate algebra, and includes thousands of problems and exercises that offer instructors and students ample opportunity to explore and reinforce useful statistical skills. The first edition of Introductory Statistics by OpenStax is available in web view here.
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Análisis Científico de la Ética desde la Perspectiva Multidisciplinaria
Maybelline Herrera-Sánchez; Geovely Olmedo Jumbo; Yeska Quezada Valarezo · Editorial Grupo AEA · 2022
El presente manuscrito es resultado de investigaciones multidisciplinarias bajo diferentes perspectivas científicas-académicas, mediante la confrontación de criterios de diferentes autores bajo un enfoque descriptivo que señala la importancia de ética en varios escenarios actuales como son en la discriminación de la mujer en ambiente laboral, el manejo de los individuos dentro de las organizaciones, dentro de la agricultura al momento de producir y cultivar, como la ética afecta al clima organizacional y lagestión docente dentro del caso de estudio de una universidad, la ética y la responsabilidad social empresarial como reto de las empresas, la discriminación laboral como comportamiento poco ético en el área de recursos humanos, y por ultimo una contrastación de la ética en la publicidad de las empresas. Estos estudios se realizan desde una mirada científica y se la acerca a la realidad ecuatoriana.
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Child Development (Cummings-Clay)
Lumen Learning · Lumen Learning
In the contents: 13.06: Gender and Sociology
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Human Aging: Biological Perspectives
Augustine G. DiGiovanna · Salisbury University
The intended audience for this book consists of students and other intelligent readers who have little or no background in science, particularly in biology. These individuals may want to learn about the biology of aging in humans for personal reasons or as part of their preparation for careers that involve working with older people, such as health care, sociology, social work, recreation, education, and psychology.