RUME 27
2025
Alexandria, Virginia
The Impact of Questions on Students’ Independent Reading of Mathematics
Page: 269
This study contributes to research on the impact of questions on students’ reading of mathematics and informs design considerations for questions included in workbooks. We used eye-tracking complemented by open-text questions. Participants were engineering and science students from the first to the third year of their studies. We considered proceduralness, conceptualness, and difficulty as dimensions of the workbook questions. We found that what we call a ‘conceptual question’ triggered more attention to the explanation than the example part of the workbook text, but so did what we call the ‘procedural question’. In addition, relative question difficulty may have influenced our results. An implication of our findings is the need to investigate the interrelations of the conceptualness and proceduralness of mathematical questions while also considering the role of questions’ relative difficulty.