2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Interactive textbooks commonly engage students by embedding questions within the reading exposition to help students review concepts and identify misconceptions. While these questions often allow the students to view the correct answer, the assumption is that students will only view the correct answer after having unsuccessfully attempted the question. How many students actually try the question before clicking to see the answer? A well-designed question set should encourage students to attempt the questions. A successful attempt provides positive reinforcement. An unsuccessful attempt can help students discover misconceptions or shortcomings in their understanding of the material. A poorly constructed question may discourage students and decrease engagement.

In this study, student responses are evaluated from multiple classes across multiple universities to unique questions embedded in an interactive control systems textbook. The study addresses three questions. First, do students make an earnest attempt at answering the questions when the answer is available with a click? Responses are considered earnest if the student made at least one attempt at answering the question before revealing the solution. Second, do specific characteristics of the interactive textbook or course correlate with increased or decreased student earnestness in answering questions? These include characteristics such as: point of progression within the course and within a chapter, class size, question difficulty, number of questions in the exercise set, and length of the online textbook section. Third, are these student behaviors consistent between students in an upper-level course like control systems, and students in an introductory-level course like circuit analysis? We compare the results for control systems to an earlier investigation in a similar online interactive textbook for circuit analysis.

Through this study, we expect to improve understanding of students’ engagement with online interactive learning materials, and factors that correlate with different levels of student engagement, to inform the further evolution of interactive textbooks.