Work in progress - measuring reading comprehension in technical courses

Reading is critical to any course. However, many courses in higher education (especially technical courses) do not emphasize reading as a significant part of the course. Despite recommendations from instructors with suggested sections to read before and after lecture, most students do not like to read or are less motivated to read material from textbooks. In this paper, we discuss a novel system that was developed and deployed to assist instructors automatically measure reading activities and to assess student degree of ldquoreading comprehensionrdquo compared to that of an expert(s). The system consists of Adaptive Book, an interactive software tool that allows students to annotate and label the text, and an online markup analysis tool that uses a heuristic rule based algorithm to compare student markups to that of an expert reader. The system has shown some early promising results in computer science pilots and may serve as a tool that can be deployed across many technical courses to encourage and assess reading.