The Merits of Digital Textbooks

The advent and increasing ubiquity of digital text books has revolutionized the reading process for students. Learners with print disabilities have especially benefited from the inclusion of accessibility features, such as larger text and text-to-speech. In addition, due to the digital nature of e-textbooks, the reading habits of readers can be monitored and stored. The learning analytics gleaned from certain digital textbooks provide academics with a wealth of meaningful data to explore and analyze for trends.

For example, a new study from Iowa State University examined the habits of students using digital textbooks from CourseSmart. Researchers compiled an “engagement index,” based on students’ highlighting and minutes spent reading. Further, they explored the number of days a student spent reading. The study concluded that both the aforementioned factors were strong indicators of academic success. However, when controlling for past academic achievement, the subject matter, course, instructor, and the number of days students read provided a much stronger predictor of performance. 

The researchers postulate that the findings of this study could help professors identify struggling students as they worked through assignments. By exploring the digital textbook metrics, professors are able to evaluate a student’s time on task, as well as their level of active learning engagement as evidenced by the frequency of their highlighting and notations. Professors could potentially use the learning analytics gleaned from digital readings as a formative assessment measure to check in on how students are faring with the academic material. However, it should be noted that in this study, while highlighting was related to final course grades, it was not statistically significant correlation. 

An article on digital textbooks and the Iowa State university study wouldn’t be complete without a note about CourseSmart, a publisher of eTextbooks and digital resources. Textbooks and resources created by CourseSmart include features that promote active reading and higher engagement. Students are able to take notes and highlight text within the digital text, as well as copy and paste to an external document for easy report writing. Students are able to use the multiple viewing functions or search the text for key words or ideas to help them better analyze and comprehend the text. CourseSmart e-textbooks can be read both online and offline, on a full range of device from laptops to phones to tablets. Further, several assistive technologies have been embedded into CourseSmart resources to meet the needs of vision and hearing impaired users. 

Missing from this study is an exploration of the privacy issues raised by this kind of analysis. The researchers note that they obtained online consent from the students whose reading patterns they examined to have their studying included and analyzed in the research project. However, as the researchers note, "The advent of digital textbooks ... affords educators the opportunity to unobtrusively collect learning analytics data from student use of reading materials." They go on to note that, "The CourseSmart analytics platform was developed to address [specific] steps of the learning analytics process. First, the analytics platform captures data on interactions with the digital textbook in real-time. Second, the platform translates the raw data into a calculated Engagement Index and reports this information to faculty." We wonder if the students using these digital books are fully aware that their professors have the capacity to see what they read, how often, and whether or not they highlight their work. 

Literacy Lessons from Teachers College – Part III Reading Comprehension

I recently attended an exciting two-day conference on literacy in the elementary and middle grades hosted by faculty from Columbia University’s Teachers College. Through lectures, readings, discussions, and collaborative group work, I learned a great deal about the implications of current research on literacy assessment and instruction. In this four part series, I am sharing what I learned about phonics, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing with readers of the Yellin Center’s blog!

Nearly every teacher, and many parents, would like to help their students improve their reading comprehension. Making meaning from the words on a page is critical for success in all content areas in school and in nearly every career after graduation. Here is some compelling information about reading comprehension from the literacy conference at Teachers College:

Background Knowledge

Alongside vocabulary knowledge, background knowledge is the biggest factor that influences reading comprehension for readers who don’t have trouble decoding (i.e. sounding out the words). Background knowledge allows readers make meaning from what they read by connecting incoming information with their own understanding of the world.

It’s helpful if teachers provide students with background knowledge but this is not always possible. Luckily, it’s not always necessary, either. Good instructors will help students activate relevant background knowledge, no matter what it is, prior to reading. For example, a text about the hardships of farm life may not resonate with inner city teenagers who have never plowed a field or fed a cow. But those teenagers probably have knowledge that can help them contextualize the passage anyway. For example, those who have kept pets understand the work that goes into caring for an animal, and kids who balance schoolwork with an after school job know what it’s like to juggle multiple responsibilities. Students can be prompted to think beyond personal experiences, too. Perhaps they remember scenes from Field of Dreams and can apply those images of cornfields to their reading. Or maybe they remember reading Esperanza Rising in middle school, which taught them about the labor needed to harvest crops. Students may not realize the value of their prior knowledge, but what they bring to a reading can vastly improve their understanding of it.

jepoirrer via flickrcc

Close Reading 

Close reading is a worthy goal for any instructor, no matter the content area, to select for his or her students. Research on close reading, or reading for a specific purpose, showed that students who did not demonstrate decoding or fluency difficulties were able to make large gains in comprehension. When students successfully read a text closely, they preview the text systematically, taking note of its structure and other relevant information. Then they read and reread carefully, self-monitoring all the while. Next, they reflect on what they’ve read to determine what’s most important. Finally, they synthesize the information and draw conclusions about it.

This complex process takes requires lots of modeling and support (and patience!) on the teacher’s part and practice on the students’ parts. But it can improve comprehension enormously. Some instructional sequences worth checking out are THIEVES (Manz, 2002 – Title, Headings, Introduction, Every first sentences, Visualize and vocabulary, End of chapter questions, Summary); TELL (Cummins, 2013 – Title, Examine, Look, Look); HIP (Hearaver, in Cummins, 2013 – Headings, Introduction, Prediction); and CATAPULT (Zwiers, 2004 – Covers, Author, Title, Audience, Page 1, Underlying message, Look at features, Time/place/important people).

Note that this kind of intensive reading is not necessary for every text. Because the process can be time-intensive and laborious, students must understand that they should reserve these strategies for dense texts that give them difficulty. Effective instructors will help students to understand which texts demand particularly close reading.

Marking Texts

Annotating a text can be a very effective way to improve comprehension. Most students benefit from learning particular ways to do it, however; simply underlining or highlighting can quickly become a passive process, and the results are difficult to navigate when the student returns to the text later. In addition to helping students understand what to underline, teachers can invent their own system of symbols for quick annotation in the margins, such as:

• Star – Information that seems very important
• Exclamation point – Something you found surprising
• Check mark – Something you agree with
• X – Something you disagree with
• Question Mark – Something you don’t understand
• Heart – Something you can connect to personally
• V – New, important vocabulary word

Stay tuned for the final post in the Teachers College Literacy series, about best practices in writing instruction!