(348a) Quantifying Reading and Online Homework Completion Using an Interactive Material and Energy Balances Textbook

Interactive textbooks provide instant feedback to students as well as to the professor. Last year, features of an interactive textbook from zyBooks for a material and energy balance course were detailed, including scaffolded question sets and animations. This year, new features include over 170 automatically graded homework problems and interactive material on using spreadsheets for solving course problems. The machine-graded, personalized homework, which are called challenge activities, include rolling numbers, randomized content, and scaffolded questions across 3 to 6 levels per activity. The increasing difficulty was verified by student success rates in 2017. Quantifying student usage will be central to this contribution. In 2016, student reading/participation averaged 87% over the entire interactive web book over the entire semester with 100 students, which far exceeds the less than 30% reading statistics in the literature. Additionally, statistically significant higher textbook reading scores were observed for students earning A and B final course grades compared to C, D, and F final grades as well as female students compared to male students. Data being generated in early 2017 will be compared to the earlier findings related to course grades and reading.