Student study habits and learning problems are part of
the information available to educators through predictive and learning analytics.This software is now being installed in digital textbooks, giving researchers
the opportunity to learn more about how students use the course material.
When CourseSmart commissioned a study of 236 students
in a 2013 pilot program, it found that students read an average of 551 pages
through a 16-week semester and spent, on averaged, 442 minutes reading their
digital textbook. Students used their digital textbooks for 11 days over the
semester and engaged in 17 reading sessions, creating an average of four
highlights, 42 bookmarks, and 16 notes in the digital material.
“No matter what a student’s prior academic ability,
which may not be specifically known, the course instructor can have an
unobtrusive real-time method to identify students at risk of academic failure
that is not tied to activity on a learning content management system,” the
authors of the report wrote.
The report indicated that, generally, the more a student engaged with the digital
textbook, the better their final grade. However, engagement didn’t always lead
to better outcomes.
“What was especially interesting was that highlighting
was related to student course outcomes, although not in the way that you might
think,” wrote Reynol Junco, associate professor of library science at Purdue
University. “Those students who were in the top 10th percentile of number of
highlights had significantly lower course grades than students in the lower
90th percentile.”
Junco attributed the difference to the fact that lower-skilled readers often highlight more text than better readers.
Junco attributed the difference to the fact that lower-skilled readers often highlight more text than better readers.
