(395l) High Reading Participation in a First Engineering Thermodynamics Course at Two Universities

Interactive textbooks are a student-centered technology that adopts some of the best practices from learning science, such as active engagement, chunking, and visual learning. Textbooks for thermodynamics are abundant as the course or courses are taught in both mechanical and chemical engineering programs. This learning analytics study quantified students’ reading participation when using an interactive textbook titled Engineering and Chemical Thermodynamics (ECT) zyBook published by Wiley. Interactivity that allows reading participation to be measured includes animations and learning questions, such as true and false, multiple choice, and matching. Thus, students’ usage create big data as click streams. Research questions include: How much reading participation do students complete by the due date? And, does reading participation vary across two universities? While thermodynamics is generally considered conceptually difficult, little data exists related to the myriad of textbooks on this topic. More generally reading by university students is nominally reported between 20 to 50% over the last few decades. Here, the ECT interactive textbook’s reading participation is reported to be 99% by median after recording hundreds or thousands of clicks per student.