Are Digital Books Effective for For Children’s Story Comprehension?

Researchers find that digital books that lack specific enhancements are less effective than printed books for story comprehension in children.

Meta-analytic study finds that children (aged 1 to 8) were less likely to understand picture books when they read them digitally compared to printed books. However, if the digital picture books have enhancements that reinforce the story content, they perform better than print books. //

The research team consisted of Natalia Kucirkova, May Irene Furenes, and Adriana G. The team analyzed data on 1,812 children aged 1 and 8 from 39 studies.

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Children's story comprehension and vocabulary learning when they read a book on paper versus on-screen were compared. The effects of story-related enhancements in digital books, the presence of a dictionary, and the role of adult support were also measured.

Findings showed that when the print and digital versions of a book are the same and only differ in the voice-over or highlighted print, print outperforms digital.

Further, if the digital device itself or the digital enhancements are not aligned with the story content, it interferes with children's story comprehension.

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However, when digital enhancements are designed to increase children's ability to make sense of the narrative, digital books outweigh the device's negative effects and outperform print books on story comprehension. For example, prompting children's background knowledge to understand the story or providing additional explanations of story events.

"Our overall findings may reflect the rather low quality of enhancements in the digital books available for young children," said Kucirkova. "Many digitized versions of picture books are inferior to the print version, yet young children widely use them."

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Many commercially published digital books don't include storytelling techniques that adults provide during book sharing.

"If we want to support all children, we need to understand the impact of digital books and make them of higher quality," said Kucirkova. "Digital books are low-cost to access and thus more readily available to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Furthermore, we can customize digital books to a child's level of learning by including interactive features responsive to the child."

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Bus explained that children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to be distracted from story content on digital books by their interactive features and when reading thedevices themselves. These children experience the most difficulty comprehending digital picture books.

The authors suggest that if digital books use a dictionary that defines infrequently used words and expressions, they may be more effective than print books to enhance children's vocabulary. But at the same time, digital dictionary features negatively affect children's ability to understand the story, as they get distracted when paying attention to word meanings.

Source-Medindia