Evaluating Academic Reading Support Tools: Developing the aRSX-Questionnaire

This paper presents and evaluates a new survey metric, the active Reading Support indeX (aRSX), which was created to help researchers and designers evaluate whether a specific software or hardware tool supports active reading of academic texts. The aRSX is comprised of questions in five categories: The Text, Cognitive Workload, Physical Workload, Perceived Learning, User Experience and Aesthetics, and Flow, as well as an open-ended question for additional comments. In this paper, we present our initial development of two beta-versions of the questionnaire in two studies of n = 100 and n = 53 deployments, evaluating paper, laptops, iPads, and reMarkable tablets as reading support tools. These studies led to the current version of the aRSX, and the initial results suggest that the metric is a reliable and valid indicator of a tool’s ability to support reading of academic texts.