Abstract
Faculty often suspect that students are not doing the assigned textbook reading—a suspicion supported by research. This can pose a problem for both student learning and outcomes, especially in cases where the textbook is intended to be the primary source of learning content that students are expected to use before class lectures, activities, discussions, etc. In a recent study, researchers gathered a variety of faculty strategies for promoting reading engagement and measured the resulting reading from digital platform data. This study provided a useful benchmark for continued research on this topic of student engagement with their textbooks. In this work-in-progress paper, we replicate the methods of this study to investigate how assigning formative practice in their etextbook reader as a strategy impacted student reading behaviors. Initial results from 13 courses at two universities reveal using formative practice as a strategy dramatically increases student reading compared to courses where it was not assigned, and this strategy yielded higher average reading than strategies reported in previous research.
