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In school education, academic performance is strongly correlated with learning engagement. Flipped classroom is a teaching strategy that focuses on promoting student engagement. In the flipped classroom strategy, students can learn the basics of a course in a digital learning environment before the class. Students can then acquire more information in the classroom through discussion activities. These activities can aid in improving teacher–student interactions and student engagement (Gillispie, 2016; McLean, Attardi, Faden, & Goldszmidt, 2016). In response to the trend of introducing a digital learning environment into school curriculum, flipped classrooms have gradually become the mainstream of teaching strategies in recent years (Mortensen & Nicholson, 2015).
In general, flipped classrooms are implemented by combining an online learning environment and a traditional classroom, covering various course subjects such as mathematics (Lai, & Hwang, 2016) or programming (Chiang, 2017) in both secondary and higher education. With the rapid development of online learning environments and their introduction into the flipped classroom strategy, students’ learning engagement can be determined by analyzing the frequency of online learning actions, such as the time spent on viewing content and the number of viewed items. Students’ learning engagement in flipped classroom can not only be measured from their learning performance in class and paper homework done after class but also can be evaluated through the learning footprint left by students in the digital learning environment (Lu, Huang, Huang, & Yang, 2017; Lu, Huang, Huang, Lin, Ogata, & Yang, 2018; Romero, López, Luna, & Ventura, 2013). Although the online learning environment aids students in learning anytime and anywhere, students require a higher level of self-learning and learning strategies (LSs) for achieving better learning outcomes. Learning in an online learning environment often requires the guidance and monitoring of a teacher for enabling students to continue effective learning activities. Therefore, researchers have investigated the role of students’ self-regulated learning (SRL), LS, and self-efficacy (SE) in the flipped classroom approach. To explore students’ learning performance and self-learning ability in flipped classroom, we proposed an SRL activity to improve students’ learning performance and their SRL, LS, and SE abilities.
Because the textual form is the basic form of learning materials, e-books are an indispensable and crucial learning tool in the digital learning environment. We employed BookRoll, an e-book reading environment, into the proposed flipped classroom strategy. In this study, reading actions in BookRoll were first used to represent students’ reading activities and then used to explore the influence of SRL, LS, and SE on reading performance. Moreover, we investigated the correlation between students’ academic performance and their reading actions. Based on the aforementioned description, three research questions (RQs) are proposed:
RQ1: Can SRL intervention improve students’ reading performance?
RQ2: Can SRL intervention improve students’ SRL, LS, and SE abilities?
RQ3: What is the correlation of SRL, LS, and SE abilities with students’ academic performance?