Iris Howley

Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Identifying Critical Reading Skills at Scale


Critical reading is an essential skill for participants in the civic dialogues and workplaces of the 21st century. Digital annotations are a novel data source for making visible these reading strategies. This work presents a step towards critical reading analytics by collecting digital social annotations and identifying student critical reading strategies across a diversity of college settings and texts. We synthesize prior research on critical reading to develop a data-driven, taxonomy of critical reading strategies. We then hand-code a sample for an exploratory analysis of student use of a digital social annotation tool.