Investigating Relations between Self-Regulated Reading Behaviors and Science Question Difficulty

Reading to learn is a quintessentially self-regulated activity. In order to provide effective support for this activity it is necessary for us to understand how students adapt their self-regulation behaviors within disciplinary reading environments. In this paper, we utilize student response data from a digital literacy platform to examine the association of students’ behaviors with the difficulty of questions embedded in science texts. We analyzed 131 distinct physical science questions used in 641 middle school classes within Actively Learn, a digital reading platform. We investigated the association of question difficulty and students’ behaviors, including reading, annotating, highlighting, and vocabulary lookups. Our findings show that students found multiple choice questions with multiple correct answers hard to answer and exhibited more reading behaviors when attempting them. Short answer questions appeared to be easier; students engaged in more annotation, highlighting vocabulary lookups when attempting easy short-answer questions compared to difficult multiple-choice questions.

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