Nonprofit textbook publisher OpenStax is participating
in a study of student highlighting habits. It’s working with researchers from
Rice University, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the University of
California, San Diego, on software that uses highlighting to help improve
student comprehension and knowledge retention.
The $1 million research program, funded by one of 18
grants awarded by the National Science Foundation, will ask OpenStax users to
volunteer content they highlight to a database to be mined for clues about their
understanding of the text. Researchers also plan laboratory tests at Rice,
UC-Boulder, and UCSD to create software to leverage the information gathered
from the volunteered highlights.
“A number of studies have shown that highlighting does
little to improve learning outcomes, but students tend to think that it does,
and it makes them feel good about studying,” Philip Grimaldi, a research
scientist for OpenStax, said in an article for phys.org. “At the same times, college students generally aren’t willing to
change how they study, so we want to piggyback on what they’re already
doing—spontaneously annotating passages of text—and turn that from a marginal
activity into one that improves learning.”
The goal is to develop software that predicts how well
students perform on tests based on what they highlight in their textbooks. From
that information, researchers want to build a tool that creates more effective
quizzes and reviews, and determines the times that are best to present content so
students get the most out of the material.
“The
idea is to reformulate selected passages into review questions that encourage
the active reconstruction and elaboration of knowledge,” said Richard Baraniuk,
founder and director of OpenStax. “The design and implementation of the tool
will be informed by both randomized controlled studies within the innovative
OpenStax textbook platform and in coordinated laboratory studies.”
