Reading Mirror
Reading Mirror
Reading Mirror is a textbook reading support interface with progress tracking and social comparison features. It attempts to integrate features of social navi- gation support, open social learner modeling, and social comparison [6, 3, 10, 9, 8] into a hierarchical structure of a typical textbook. Our main challenge was to design a visualization, which allows students to track their own reading perfor- mance and compare it with class performance while using space efficiently. In our past attempt to implement social comparison in a textbook context [9] we used a sunburst visualization, which offered an expressive approach for tracking student progress, but consumed a considerable amount of space and provided poor support for social comparison. In the Reading Mirror project, we applied a colored icicle plot [2], which is able to efficiently visualize hierarchical data in a linear form. This approach provided space-saving support for both progress tracking and social comparison, i.e., comparing student own behavior with the progress of the whole class.
2.1 Self-Monitoring Visualization
Reading Mirror visualizes student own reading progress in the context of a hier- archical textbook visualization, which follow the following structure: lecture → book chapter → section → subsection (see Fig. ??). Each unit of reading is represented by a rectangle. The larger the height of a rectangle, the larger num- ber of pages the chapter, section, or subsection has. This visual variable allows students to see at a glance which lectures are more heavy in terms of reading material. To display current reading progress, we colored rectangles represent- ing readings units with different shades of blue. The color reflects the fraction of already read pages in a unit. If a rectangle is white it means that the student has not read any related page. Otherwise, the darker its blue shade, the more pages the student has visited in that specific unit. The reading progress visualization is combined with visualization of student performance on quizzes. To show quiz performance, next to the progress icicle plot we added a small bar graph which reflects success rate on answering the quiz associated with each section (see Fig. 1). Here the red portion of the bar shows the proportion of incorrect answers while the green portion shows the fraction of correct answers on that quiz.
2.2 Social Comparison
The design of the social comparison part of the Reading Mirror was motivated by recent findings in information visualization research, which indicated that correlation tasks (i.e. detecting if two data distributions were similar or not) are better supported when presented with mirrored graphs [12]. This work confirmed earlier findings stating that capability of the human visual system for detecting visual differences between two regions is more efficient when they are laid out as mirror images of each other, compared to repeated translations of each other Considering this, the visualization component that allows learners to compare their own work with the rest of the class was designed as a mirrored version of the individual progress icicle plot.
