Back in 2013 I wrote about the growing trend of textbook analytics that aimed to provide teachers (and students) with insight as to how they were digesting the information in their digital text books.

A recent study from Iowa State University shows how valuable this level of information can be for teachers.

Student analytics

It revealed that the analytics provided on each student proved to be very accurate at predicting the subsequent performance of those students.

For instance, the more students spent reading the textbook, the better they did.  Of course, that seems rather obvious, but the diligence of each student would be information that is traditionally hidden from the teacher.

“If students are not reading the textbook, they’re not getting the important material that they need. My lectures only cover the general ideas and then we do hands-on work in class,” the researchers say. “As an instructor, you don’t really get a sense of how students are doing in a class until they turn in a graded assignment. With the analytics from a digital textbook I can know right away if students are struggling.”

Of course, there are many possible reasons why a student may not be engaging with the text, and the data doesn’t really provide that level of insight, but it does nonetheless alert the teacher to any potential issues.

Insight into academic performance

Interestingly, it also emerged that the textbook analytics were a better predictor of future performance than the students past performance in class.

“Now we have an individualized measure of how well students will do in class,” the authors say. “It’s also a behavioral measure. We can use these behavioral and real-time data to make decisions about student performance, without clumping students into these categories of ‘will succeed’ or ‘won’t succeed.'”

Despite this apparent benefit of using digital textbooks, they remain far from uniformly adopted in classrooms.  The paper reveals that their adoption is often driven by the student and whether they prefer ebooks to paper alternatives.

The authors believe that the analytics provided by digital text books can prove invaluable in informing teaching styles whilst also reinforcing to students the importance of reading.