Students Reading E-Books Are Losing Out, Study Suggests
Could e-books actually get in the way of reading?
That was the question explored in research presented
last week by Heather Ruetschlin Schugar, an associate professor at West
Chester University, and her spouse, Jordan T. Schugar, an instructor at
the same institution. Speaking at the annual conference of the American
Educational Research Association in Philadelphia, the Schugars reported
the results of a study in which they asked middle school students to
read either traditional printed books or e-books on iPads. The students’
reading comprehension, the researchers found, was higher when they read
conventional books.
In a second study looking at students’ use of
e-books created with Apple’s iBooks Author software, the Schugars
discovered that the young readers often skipped over the text
altogether, engaging instead with the books’ interactive visual
features.
While their findings are suggestive, they are
preliminary and based on small samples of students. More substance can
be found in the Schugars’ previous work: for example, a paper
they published last year with their colleague Carol A. Smith in the
journal The Reading Teacher. In this study, the authors observed
teachers and teachers-in-training as they used interactive e-books with
children in kindergarten through sixth grade. (The e-books were mobile
apps, downloadable from online stores like iTunes.)
While young readers find these digital
products very appealing, their multitude of features may diffuse
children’s attention, interfering with their comprehension of the text,
Ms. Smith and the Schugars found. It seems that the very “richness” of
the multimedia environment that e-books provide — heralded as their
advantage over printed books — may overwhelm children’s limited working
memory, leading them to lose the thread of the narrative or to process
the meaning of the story less deeply.
This is especially true of what the authors
call some e-books’ “gimmicks and distractions.” In the book “Sir Charlie
Stinky Socks and the Really Big Adventure,” for example, children can
touch “wiggly woos” to make the creatures emit noise and move around the
screen. In another e-book, “Rocket Learns to Read,” a bird flutters and
sounds play in the background.
Such flourishes can interrupt the fluency of
children’s reading and cause their comprehension to fragment, the
authors found. They can also lead children to spend less time reading
over all: One study cited by Ms. Smith and the Schugars reported that
children spent 43 percent of their e-book engagement time playing games
embedded in the e-books rather than reading the text.
By contrast, the authors observed, some
e-books offer multimedia features that enhance comprehension. In “Miss
Spider’s Tea Party,” for example, children hear the sound of Miss Spider
drinking as they read the words “Miss Spider sipped her tea.” In
another e-book, “Wild About Books,” sounds of laughter ring out as the
reader encounters the line “Hyenas shared jokes with the red-bellied
snakes.”
The quality of e-books for children varies
wildly, the authors said: “Because the app market allows for the
distribution of materials without the rigorous review process that is
typical of traditional children’s book publishing, more caution is
necessary for choosing high-quality texts.”
They advise parents and teachers to look for
e-books that enhance and extend interactions with the text, rather than
those that offer only distractions; that promote interactions that are
relatively brief rather than time-consuming; that provide supports for
making text-based inferences or understanding difficult vocabulary; and
that locate interactions on the same page as the text display, rather
than on a separate screen. (E-books recommended by the authors are
listed below.)
Once the e-books are selected, parents and
teachers must also help children use them effectively, Ms. Smith and the
Schugars said. This can include familiarizing children with the basics
of the device. Although adults may assume that their little “digital
natives” will figure out the gadgets themselves, the researchers have
found that children often need adult guidance in operating e-readers.
Parents and teachers should also help
children in transferring what they know about print reading to
e-reading. Children may not automatically apply reading skills they have
learned on traditional books to e-books, and these skills, such as
identifying the main idea and setting aside unimportant details, are
especially crucial when reading e-books because of the profusion of
distractions they provide.
Lastly, adults should ensure that children
are not overusing e-book features like the electronic dictionary or the
“read-to-me” option. Young readers can often benefit from looking up the
definition of a word with a click, but doing it too often will disrupt
reading fluidity and comprehension. Even without connecting to the
dictionary, children are able to glean the meaning of many words from
context. Likewise, the read-to-me feature can be useful in decoding a
difficult word, but when used too often it discourages children from
sounding out words on their own.
Research shows that children often read
e-books “with minimal adult involvement,” Ms. Smith and the Schugars
said. While we may assume that interactive e-books can entertain
children all by themselves, such products require more input from us
than books on paper do.
Recommended E-Books
For beginning readers
For beginning readers
“Blue Hat, Green Hat” by Sandra Boynton
“Go, Clifford, Go!” by Norman Bridwell
“Meet Biscuit” by Alyssa Satin Capucilli
“Nickelby Swift, Kitten Catastrophe” by Ben Hecht
“Miss Spider’s Tea Party” by David Kirk
“A Fine Musician” by Lucy Thomson
For fluent readers
“Slice of Bread Goes to the Beach” by Glenn Melenhorst
“Who Would Win? Killer Whale Vs. Great White Shark” by Jerry Pallotta
“Wild About Books” by Judy Sierra
“The Artifacts” by Lynley Stace and Dan Hare