Reading Skill, Textbook Marking, and Course Performance

Abstract

We surveyed students enrolled in Introductory Psychology courses about their text marking preferences and analyzed the marking in their textbooks. Low-skill readers report more reliance on highlighting strategies and actually mark their texts more than better readers. In addition, low-skilled readers prefer to buy used, previously marked texts over new ones! Furthermore, when low-skill readers mark their texts, they are less capable of marking the most relevant material as determined by instructors asked to mark sampled text pages for comparison. All of this adds up to a destructive feedback system in which students who are weak readers can make things even worse in terms of course performance due to their text marking preferences and behaviors.