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We investigate whether student comprehension and knowledge retention can be predicted from textbook annotations, specifically the material that students choose to highlight. Using a digital open-access textbook platform, Openstax, students enrolled in Biology, Physics, and Sociology courses read sections of their introductory text as part of required coursework, optionally highlighted the text to flag key material, and then took brief quizzes as the end of each section. We find that when students choose to highlight, the specific pattern of highlights can explain about 13% of the variance in observed quiz scores. We explore many different representations of the pattern of highlights and discover that a low-dimensional logistic principal component based vector is most effective as input to a ridge regression model. Considering the many sources of uncontrolled variability affecting student performance, we are encouraged by the strong signal that highlights provide as to a student’s knowledge state. 

When engaging with a textbook, students are inclined to highlight key content. Although students believe that highlighting and subsequent review of the highlights will further their educational goals, the psychological literature provides no evidence of benefits. Nonetheless, a student’s choice of text for highlighting may serve as a window into their mental state—their level of comprehension, grasp of the key ideas, reading goals, etc. We explore this hypothesis via an experiment in which 198 participants read sections from a college-level biology text, briefly reviewed the text, and then took a quiz on the material. During initial reading, participants were able to highlight words, phrases, and sentences, and these highlights were displayed along with the complete text during the subsequent review. Consistent with past research, the amount of highlighted material is unrelated to quiz performance. However, our main goal is to examine highlighting as a data source for inferring student understanding. We explored multiple representations of the highlighting patterns and tested Bayesian linear regression and neural network models, but we found little or no relationship between a student’s highlights and quiz performance. Our long-term goal is to design digital textbooks that serve not only as conduits of information into the mind of the reader, but also allow us to draw inferences about the reader at a point where interventions may increase the effectiveness of the material.