  The purpose of this study is to explore students' backtracking patterns in
using a digital textbook and reveal the relationship between backtracking
behaviors and academic performance as well as learning styles. The study was
carried out for two semesters on 102 university students and they are required
to use a digital textbook system called DITeL to review courseware. Students'
backtracking behaviors are characterized by seven backtracking features
extracted from interaction log data and their learning styles are measured by
Felder-Silverman learning style model. The results of the study reveal that
there is a subgroup of students called backtrackers who backtrack more
frequently and performed better than the average students. Furthermore, the
causal inference analysis reveals that a higher initial ability can directly
cause a higher frequency of backtracking, thus affecting the final test score.
In addition, most backtrackers are reflective and visual learners, and the
seven backtracking features are good predictors in automatically identifying
learning styles. Based on the results of qualitative data analysis,
recommendations were made on how to provide prompt backtracking assistants and
automatically detect learning styles in digital textbooks.
