How High School, College, and Online Students Differentially Engage with an Interactive Digital Textbook

Digital textbooks have been growing popular as a lower-cost and more interactive alternative to paper books. Despite the recent rise in adoption, little is known about how people use these resources. Prior studies have investigated student perceptions of digital textbooks in the classroom via interviews and surveys but have not quantified actual usage patterns. We present, to our knowledge, the first large-scale quantitative study of digital textbook usage. We mined 6.8 million log events from over 43,000 people interacting with How To Think Like a Computer Scientist, one of the most widely-used Web-based textbooks for learning computer programming. We compared engagement patterns among three populations: high school students, college students, and online website viewers. We discovered that people made extensive use of interactive components such as executing code and answering multiple-choice questions, engaged for longer when taking high school or college courses, and frequently viewed textbook sections out of order.