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Investigating the Role of User Engagement in Digital Reading Environments Heather L. O’Brien School of Library, Archival and Information Studies University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada 1-604-822-6365 h.obrien@ubc.ca Luanne Freund School of Library, Archival and Information Studies University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada 1- 604-822-0825 Luanne.Freund@ubc.ca Richard Kopak School of Library, Archival and Information Studies University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada 1- 604-822-2898 r.kopak@ubc.ca ABSTRACT User engagement is recognized as an important component of the user experience, but relatively little is known about the effect of engagement on the learning outcomes of such interactions. This experimental user study examines the relationship between user engagement (UE) and comprehension in varied academic reading environments. Forty-one university students interacted with one of two sets of texts presented in 4 conditions in the context of preparing for a class assignment. Employing the User Engagement Scale (UES), we found evidence of a relationship between students’ comprehension of the texts and their degree of engagement with them. However, this association was confined to one of the UES subscales and was not consistent across levels of engagement. An examination of additional variables found little evidence that system and content characteristics influenced engagement; however, we noted that all students’ reported increased knowledge, but topical interest for non-engaged students declined. Results contribute to existing literature by adding further evidence that the relationship between engagement and comprehension is complex and mediated. Keywords User engagement; comprehension; digital reading environments 1. INTRODUCTION In digital information environments, user engagement (UE), “a user’s response to an interaction that gains, maintains and encourages attention” [18], is viewed as a positive and necessary component of human information interaction. It is a widely held belief that UE mediates outcomes such as knowledge acquisition, yet there is conflicting evidence to support this claim. While we do know that UE is pivotal in fostering long-term relationships between users and systems [43], most work has focused on users’ interaction preferences. For example, [19] noted that users preferred more “engaging” educational multimedia systems, but that modality preferences were mediated by task type (searching versus browsing). Other researchers have focused on the role of UE in the adoption of learning technologies [17, 44] and the effect of interactive computer-mediated environments on learning [36, 10]. Yet drawing any larger conclusions about the relationship between UE and learning is inhibited by a lack of consistency in how researchers define and measure both UE and learning. Research on human information interaction and retrieval has tended to focus on user-system interaction outcomes such as the retrieval of relevant documents or user satisfaction, rather than comprehension or learning per se. While some studies measure self-reported topical knowledge and search expertise to document cognitive changes during the search process [20], more robust methods are needed to ascertain the extent to which users develop cognitively and affectively through their interactions with systems. Comprehension, the process of extracting meaning from information [30], is a critical indicator of success for information systems, yet largely under-researched in interactive information retrieval (IIR). In this research, we focused specifically on comprehension as an outcome of interacting with digital texts. Drawing upon prior research on the design of digital reading environments [36, 23, 26], we created a reading interface with different modes of interaction (note-taking and annotation) and text representation. We investigated whether UE affected comprehension outcomes and whether features of these reading environments influenced UE. Our initial conjecture was that more engaged readers would score higher on comprehension tests and that more interactive and visually rich reading environments would be more engaging. While there was a relationship between UE and comprehension, we found that it was more nuanced than we predicted, leading us to explore the role of user, system and content characteristics to interpret the findings. In this paper, we review relevant prior research and outline our methodology, and then describe our findings in detail. We conclude with a discussion of the findings and illuminate future directions for examining the relationship between UE and comprehension in human information interaction research and applications. 2.PRIOR RESEARCH 2.1. User Engagement (UE) This research builds upon the work of [33] that defined user engagement as a multidimensional construct comprising the interaction between cognitive (e.g., attention), affective (e.g., emotion, interest), and behavioral (e.g., propensity to re-engage with a technology) characteristics of users, and system features (e.g., usability). UE is characterized by a number of interrelated factors: attention, motivation, control, hedonic and utilitarian Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the fullcitation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by othersthan the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copyotherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires priorspecific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. CHIIR’16, March 13–17, 2016, Carrboro, North Carolina, USA Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-3751-9/16/03…$15.00. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2854946.2854973 71