What is Active Reading

In the age of online textbooks and digital reading devices, the nature of active reading has changed. During active reading, learners build and analyze the materials they read by applying specific strategies, such as annotating, summarizing, and developing study guides or other artifacts in an effort to comprehend, memorize, and synthesize information. However, research suggests that as textbooks migrate to the digital space, contemporary active reading may be more accurately conceptualized as, at least in part, dependent upon the medium or the platform on which it occurs. This chapter proposes a novel perspective for understanding active reading called Multimedia Active Reading, which is empirically grounded in prior research that uncovered ways in which learner behaviors in the tablet textbook environment map to common physical active reading strategies (i.e., annotation, reorganization, browsing, and cross-referencing) and introduced and evaluated novel active reading support designed for the tablet textbook environment.