Understanding Reading Behaviors of Middle School Students

Rich models of students' learning and problem-solving behaviors can support tailored interventions by instructors and scaffolding of complex learning activities. Our goal in this paper is to identify students' reading behaviors as they engage with instructional texts in domain-specific activities. In this work, we apply theory and methodology from the learning sciences to a large-scale middle school dataset within a digital literacy platform, Actively Learn. We compare students' reading behaviors both within and across domains for 12,566 science and 16,240 social studies students. Our findings show that higher-performing students in science engaged in more metacognitively-rich reading activities, such as text annotation; whereas lower-performing students relied more on simple highlighting and took longer to respond to embedded questions. Higher-performing students in social studies, by contrast, engaged more with the vocabulary and took longer to read before attempting question responses. Our finding may be used as recommendations to help both teachers and students engage in and support more effective behaviors.