(61g) Measuring Spreadsheet Skills Using Analytics within an Interactive Textbook

Spreadsheets are a daily part of more chemical engineers’ lives. Spreadsheets are a mature product and available in many forms, including Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and many others. Across versions, devices, and platforms (e.g., Windows, Mac, iOS, Android), many formulas, functions, and tasks are common. Spreadsheets Essentials is an interactive textbook from zyBooks that allows students many opportunities to click and learn new material. Examples include stepping through animations, completing matching question sets, and perform spreadsheet functions on auto-graded, randomized problems. Beyond basic spreadsheet usage, advanced topics are available, such as solver, interpolation, numerical integration, error, statistics, and matrix operations. Interactivity creates big data aggregated in real time for instructors via student clicks and data entry. Using a small fraction of the final course grade as an incentive, reading rates above 90% were observed in 2018 and 2019. Success on over 120 auto-graded questions will also be included. Finally, determining which auto-graded questions take students the most attempts before correct is one question to be addressed using big data created by students using an interactive textbook.