Analysis on Students’ Usage of Highlighters on E-textbooks in Classroom

Abstract

E-book has been gradually getting popularity in educational contexts. Reading textbooks on computers or hand-held devices enables us to track the learning activities of students regardless of situations. In our university, several courses for first year students employs our e-book system, and we have been collecting its usage logs. From the logs, it seems that the highlighter function of the e-book reader plays an important role in learning because it is used most by the students. Though many researches studied the effectiveness of e-textbooks, only limited studies addressed how students utilize highlighters and how marking activity affects their learning. In this paper, we focus on highlighted portions of e-textbooks, and analyze how students use highlighters in their learning. We also attempt to provide recommendations to students for highlighting based on the highlighter usage in other classes.