Using Questions to Promote Thinking, Teaching, and Continuous Improvement of an Interactive Online Textbook

• In Event: Cognitive Principles in Technology Environments

Abstract

Questions are generally used in traditional textbooks for summative assessment and knowledge consolidation. Putting textbooks online and making them interactive enable questions to be used differently. Interleaved questions can be formative, providing not only a means for students to check for their own understanding but also a way to normalize their confusion and nudge them toward deeper thinking. In addition, students’ responses can also be delivered in realtime to their teachers to inform further instruction, and to textbook developers to inform textbook improvement. In this paper, we report on the use of questions in an interactive online statistics textbook. We explore three functions of questions: promoting learning, informing teaching, and contributing to the continuous improvement of the textbook.

Authors

• Icy(Yunyi) Zhang, University of California - Los Angeles

• Karen Givvin

• Ji Son

• James W. Stigler, University of California - Los Angeles