Develop a reading tracking function on e-book reading system by using sensing and cloudized storage technologies

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Develop a reading tracking function on e-book

reading system by using sensing and cloudized

storage technologies

Chia-Hung Lai1

Department of Engineering Science National Cheng Kung University

Tainan, Taiwan [email protected]

Lu-Chun Pan2

Chia-Cheng Hsu3

Yen-Ning Su4

Yu-Lin Jeng5

Cloud System Software Institute Institute for Information Industry

Taipei, Taiwan [email protected]

Chia-Ju Liu6

Graduate Institute of Science Education and Environmental Education

National Kaohsiung Normal University Kaohsiung, Taiwan

[email protected]

Yueh-Min Huang7,*

Abstract—Reading is an important task to enrich students' knowledge and to enhance students' ability and skills of learning and thinking. Moreover, reading is the well-known brain exercise which helps the brain to improve concentration, promotes empathy, and helps the brain to effectively construct links between neurons. If a person can often keep reading habits, reading is the best exercise to prevent loss of cognitive function in old age. With the advanced development of the Internet and the popularity of electron carriers, electronic books (e-books) have been as computer-aided tools to help students learn in the classroom teaching activities. Sensing and clouding storage technologies are used as tools to assist teachers in teaching students to understand the learning status and learning achievement. In general, reading mainly is divided into two phases, learning to read, and reading to learn. In order to understand the learning status of students, teachers observe the learning behavior of students and analyze their learning ability and skills to adjust the teaching strategies and teaching progresses for adaptive learning in classrooms. In order to help teachers effectively observe students' learning, this study proposed a cloudized e-book reading rate tracking system (CERRTS) with an e-book learning environment and the proposed system includes the sensing technology of touch screen and the cloudized technology of storage. In order to verify the function of the proposed system, the study used a camera to record the learning status of students and to

compare the reading rate of the system records and the reading rate of the camera recording. The results show that there is not significantly different between the system and the video. Moreover, the proposed system provided a friendly computer-assisted tool that helps instructors understand the learning status of students.

Keywords-Readning process;Reading rate; E-books; Sensor technology

I. INTRODUCTION

Reading is an important ability in everyone’s own life. No matter in child or adult life, reading is impacting on personal development, cognitive development, and mental development. In recent years, educational researchers based on a variety of different term conducted relevant research about reading ability. Hallam [1] used the most advanced technologies to study the brain. In his research, music intervene to instruction when the participant reading. Earlier, Ron [2] presented a meta-analysis of the music intervened studies would help to clarify another possible relationship in reading. On the other term, cognitive development is the other one factor which influences reading ability. In the cognitive development term, the broad-scale project had been implemented in British. The project would demand test

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of reading ability for children’s early cognitive. It’s described that the children’s reading behavior in cognitive development which affected by parents and infer worse-off parents would score poorly children [3]. Arter and Spandel [4] also proposed that clarify the reading ability in the class is important. The main work of her/his study is to understand student’s behavior in the instruction. They obtain the behavior record in the portfolio platform. The data on student’s reading behavior were successfully received and conducted for analysis. They suggested that reading behavior exited direct effect to the student’s achievement. The results of those researches proposed that reading is a multi-term ability. It’s based on personal, mental, and cognitive development.

As far as the reading behavior, it could be roughly in two terms, article [5] and reader. Form the reader role, most of academic describe factors which inference children reading, like attention, abilities of literacy, Inference abilities, prior knowledge, working memory, meta-cognitive. In recent twenty years, the digital learning environments where changing students’ reading behavior. Liu [6] indicate that attention is one of important factor in reading behavior. Furthermore, students’ attention would directly affect student reading effectiveness, no matter high attention or low attention. Savage, Cornish, Manly and Hollis [7] addressed that the students had a low attention status in starting reading stage. Based on those low attention students, Wittrock [8] proposed strategies to enhance students’ attention. The strategies implement in the reading process. It requests some action, like stop, look, speech, and listen. Based on the strategies, students’ attention could be enhanced. However, how to determine students’ attention has become an important research issue in the educational field. Herman [9] presented that reading rate is an emphasis index of reading behavior and attention. In this study, there exists considerable relevance between reading rate and students’ attention. After this kind of research, reading rate has become main stream of understanding students’ reading behavior.

In past learning environment, when teachers want to understand students’ reading rate, they must spend a lot of times and costs. It is hard to calculate reading rate without useful tools. In paper-based reading environment, some of the researches focus on the paper size [10], browse type [11], and font size [12]. Those of research issue do not directly affect to understand students’ reading rate. It could not help teachers to know the student’s reading rate. According to the information technologies and cloudized technologies [13] faster development, e-book and other mobile device is integrated into the pedagogy. It is easy to obtain reading rate can be measured by the current information technology. But in the current market, almost could be named e-book. Most of e-books only provide browse function. Sensing technology with electronic carriers also used to observe the learning status of students [14, 15].It could not measure the reading rate and to understand the situation of students’ reading. Overview, this study proposed an e-book reading system. The participant of this system is focuses on elementary school students. The e-book reading system is

based on the touch technology. Touch technology is a development complete technology of sensing technology. In this study, the purpose of the e-book reading system is to help teacher to record students’ reading rate. Moreover, the usable function of the e-book reading system has been evaluated in this study.

II. METHODS AND RESULTS

A. Reading rates and Situation description

Reading is very complex process, which contains text decoding, sentence processing, and understanding the meaning of the text, and if any one of these is too difficult, then it is likely to reduce a reader’s reading performance and reading rate [16]. Freeland, Skinner, Jackson, McDaniel and Smith [17] pointed out that readers usually adjust their reading rates to better understand the text content, and this is especially true when they want to read learning materials. Rasinski [18] pointed out that when students encounter unfamiliar words or sentences, they may concentrate on decoding and word meaning, which can also reduce their reading rates. In contrast, when the students are familiar with the words in a text, they will focus on understanding of the content and increase their reading rates under a fixed value of reading rate. If a student has a low reading rate, then they may be in an inefficient reading state. Therefore, if instructors can observe the changes in the reading rates of students, then they can more accurately evaluate their reading statuses [16].

On the other hand, due to the primary- and middle-grade students in elementary school may pay less attention when they reading a book. Based on this situation, have a strategy that was asked students to use a finger to follow the text on the page in a real classroom. Thus, in this study we will follow this strategy, and track the reading rate through students use a finger to touch the text on the screen.

B. Research methods and procedure

Following the Systems Development Life Cycle process [19], this study constructed cloudized e-book reading rate tracking system (CERRTS) using sensing and cloudized storage technologies for elementary school students using the procedure shown in Figure 1. The research procedure was divided into three steps as follows.

Figure 1. Research procedure ● Analysis (Step one):

In step one, the research team co-constructed the e-book reading process tracking system framework based on a literature review.

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Based on the sensing and cloudized storage technologies, the research team developed a cloudized e-book reading rate tracking system over about one month. In order to enhance system usability, the research team continually discussed and tested the system functionality during this step.

The system was developed using the Java script, PHP, MySQL and cloudized storage technologies, which is a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in web-based environment. System framework shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Framework of the proposed system In order to track the reading rate, the students were asked to use a finger to follow the text on the screen, and the reading system then recorded the words read per minute. The system interface shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. System interface of the proposed system ● Testing (Step three):

This study selected a middle-grade student (One boy in an elementary school in Taiwan) to conduct about 17 minutes of system testing through reading e-books. The testing process included the reading task introduction (2 minutes), and system operation (15 minutes). Finally, this student's reading rate collected by our proposed system, were analyzed in order to better understand the usability of this system. The elementary school student testing the proposed system shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. System testing by elementary school student

C. Results

In this study, we compared the student's reading rate in an e-book reading task between system rate and video rate, as shown in Table 1.The result of reading rate shows that the reading rate of the student has no significant difference between using system record and using video record. That result means that our proposed system can accurate record students' reading rate when they reading e-books.

Table 1. T-test results of reading rate between S rate and V rate

Reading rate N M SD T d

System rate 15 145.87 16.70 -.573 0.21 Video rate 15 149.47 17.72

In addition, we also further draw a plotting of system rate and video rate shown in Figure 5. Those data is collected from student reading on e-book system process. The result means that two methods (system record and video record) are similar in reading rate to read an e-book.

Figure 5. The plotting of system rate and video rate III. CONCLUSIONS

Reading is to help learners to receive information and build knowledge. With the prevalence of the Internet and sensing technology, the type of reading tools evolved from the traditional paper to the tablet computer or electronic carrier. Some studies have explored the reading behavior of students with e-books. Reading behavior is a very complex behavior so that teachers are not easy to understand students' learning through the observation of reading behavior. For an

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experienced teacher, learning status of students can be understood through classroom observation; however, it will cause a great burden for teachers, and may affect the progress and quality of teaching. Through the computer technology, reading behavior and history have become be observed. Reading behavior includes a variety of factors, such as the reading number or frequency of a book, the reading number of books, reading posture, reading rate, and so on. This study focused on reading rate when a learner is in the reading.

For the reading rate of students, this study proposed a CERRTS which integrated the reading rate and the cloudized technology to assist teachers in make more efficient observation of students' learning states. After the use of the proposed system for the students, the results show that the reading rate of system records is close to the reading rate of camera recording. The results present that the CEERTS can efficiently and effectively record students' reading speed so that teachers can quickly understand and master their learning status.

In order to satisfy the learning effectiveness of reading when the students are in reading process, we plan to provide added functions on word learning to improve the functions of this CERRTS. For example, this system can add the function of word explanation on the system to help students to understand the meaning of new words and the meaning of the whole sentence, when a student encounters new words on a reading process. This system should add some useful websites of word explanation for students to make effective search to satisfy the use convenience of this e-book system. Therefore, in our future work, we plan to use more reading-related factors to satisfy the needs of reading and teaching activities. In addition, we will extend this study in actual reading activities and assess its usefulness.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This study is conducted under the "Cloud computing systems and software development project (2/3)" of the Institute for Information Industry which is subsidized by the Ministry of Economy Affairs of the Republic of China. Otherwise, National Science Council (NSC), Taiwan, ROC, under contracts No .NSC 100-2511-S-006-014-MY3, NSC 102-2811-S-006-002, NSC 101-2511-S-041-001-MY3, and NSC 101-3113-P-006-023- was developed part of system function in this study.

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