2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Interactive textbooks provide a new, student-centered paradigm based on many best practices from learning science, including active engagement, chunking, and visual learning. Thermodynamics, a foundational yet often conceptually challenging subject for mechanical and chemical engineers, presents a valuable opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of interactive resources. Here, a learning analytics study is completed to quantify and interpret students’ reading participation. The interactive textbook is titled Engineering and Chemical Thermodynamics zyBook published by Wiley. The book includes dozens of animations and questions sets – including true and false, multiple choice, and matching. Thus, students’ engagement generates big data. Two research questions ground this work: 1. Do students complete reading participation by the due date? And 2. How does reading participation vary across two universities? Data from two undergraduate cohorts at different universities (n=57) demonstrated high reading participation rates, with the median exceeding 99% for both groups of students, far exceeding the reported average of 20 to 50% over the last few decades. Further, this effort-based measure of reading participation exhibited no significant variation by class size, university type, or location. Student performance on auto-graded challenge problems demonstrated more significant variation between the two cohorts, although the fraction correct remained consistently high (median ≥84%). Overall, students who achieved A course grades engaged more deeply and regularly with the interactive materials, completing nearly all assigned reading tasks and auto-graded problems. This contribution underscores the potential of interactive textbooks to enhance learning outcomes, particularly in challenging STEM courses.