The effect of reading engagement on scientific literacy – an analysis based on the XGBoost method

Scientific literacy is a key factor of personal competitiveness, and reading is the most common activity in daily learning life, and playing the influence of reading on individuals day by day is the most convenient way to improve the level of scientific literacy of all people. Reading engagement is one of the important student characteristics related to reading literacy, which is highly malleable and is jointly reflected by behavioral, cognitive, and affective engagement, and it is of theoretical and practical significance to explore the relationship between reading engagement and scientific literacy using reading engagement as an entry point. In this study, we used PISA2018 data from China to explore the relationship between reading engagement and scientific literacy with a sample of 15-year-old students in mainland China. 36 variables related to reading engagement and background variables (gender, grade, and socioeconomic and cultural status of the family) were selected from the questionnaire as the independent variables, and the score of the Scientific Literacy Assessment (SLA) was taken as the outcome variable, and supervised machine learning method, the XGBoost algorithm, to construct the model. The dataset is randomly divided into training set and test set to optimize the model, which can verify that the obtained model has good fitting degree and generalization ability. Meanwhile, global and local personalized interpretation is done by introducing the SHAP value, a cutting-edge machine model interpretation method. It is found that among the three major components of reading engagement, cognitive engagement is the more influential factor, and students with high reading cognitive engagement level are more likely to get high scores in scientific literacy assessment, which is relatively dominant in the model of this study. On the other hand, this study verifies the feasibility of the current popular machine learning model, i.e., XGBoost, in a large-scale international education assessment program, with a better model adaptability and conditions for global and local interpretation.