Reading into the Text: Investigating the Influence of Text Complexity on Cognitive Engagement

Boredom and disengagement have been found to negatively impact learning. Therefore, it is important for learning environments to be able to track when students disengage from a learning task. We investigated a method to track engagement during self-paced reading by analyzing reading times. We propose that a breakdown in the relationship between reading time and text complexity can reveal disengagement. A discrepancy (or decoupling) between attention resources and text complexity was computed via the absolute difference between reading times and the text’s Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, a measure of text complexity. As expected, decoupling varied as a function of text complexity. We also found that text complexity differentially impacted decoupling profiles for different types of participants (i.e., high vs. low comprehenders, fast vs. slow readers). These results suggest that decoupling scores may be a viable method to track disengagement during reading and could be used to trigger interventions to help students re-engage with the text and ultimately learn the material more effectively.