A meta-analysis was conducted on the effects of technology-enhanced stories for young children’s literacy development when compared to listening to stories in more traditional settings like storybook reading. A small but significant additional benefit of technology was found for story comprehension (g+ = 0.17) and expressive vocabulary (g+ = 0.20), based on data from 2,147 children in 43 studies. When investigating the different characteristics of technology-enhanced stories, multimedia features like animated pictures, music, and sound effects were found beneficial. In contrast, interactive elements like hotspots, games, and dictionaries were found to be distracting. Especially for children disadvantaged because of less stimulating family environments, multimedia features were helpful and interactive features were detrimental. Findings are discussed from the perspective of cognitive processing theories.

The present meta-analysis challenges the notion that young children necessarily need adult scaffolding in order to understand a narrative story and learn words as long as they encounter optimally designed multimedia stories. Including 29 studies and 1272 children, multimedia stories were found more beneficial than encounters with traditional story materials that did not include the help of an adult for story comprehension (g+ = 0.40, k = 18) as well as vocabulary (g+ = 0.30, k = 11). However, no significant differences were found between the learning outcomes of multimedia stories and sharing traditional print-like stories with an adult. It is concluded that multimedia features like animated illustrations, background music and sound effects provide similar scaffolding of story comprehension and word learning as an adult.

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Background: Previous meta-analyses have shown that feedback targeting text comprehension given when students perform a reading task positively influences learning from text. So far, differences in the effects of feedback were explained by design features, such as the timing and richness of feedback. In the present study, we aim to investigate cognitive and affective processes that might be triggered by feedback targeting text comprehension. Method: Two meta-analyses were performed on feedback intervention studies that included statistics for both the effect of feedback targeting text comprehension on the use of reading strategies (k = 8) or readers' attitudes towards the reading task (k = 10) and the effect of feedback on reading comprehension. We first tested whether feedback significantly affected the use of reading strategies or readers' attitudes. We then performed a meta-regression analysis to test if the magnitude of the effect significantly predicted gains in reading comprehension. Results: Feedback targeting text comprehension had a positive and significant impact on the use of reading strategies (g + = 0.61) and on reading comprehension (g + = 0.34). Additionally, the magnitude of the effect on the use of reading strategies was positively related to the magnitude of the effect on reading comprehension. Feedback targeting text comprehension did not influence readers' attitudes towards the reading task. Also, no significant effect of feedback was found for reading comprehension in these studies. Conclusions: Feedback targeting text comprehension helps students to apply reading strategies more often and/or more efficiently, even when they read new texts without the help of feedback. This transfer of practiced reading strategies in turn fosters reading comprehension. Due to the scarce number of studies, the results of the presentThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

The aim of the present study was to gain insight into the neurobiological processes, particularly the dopaminergic processes, underlying attentional control during reading and reading comprehension. In order to test the effects of increased levels of dopamine (DA) in the brain, female university students (N = 80), half of them being carriers of the DRD4-7R allele and half of them not, participated in a double-blind placebo-controlled within-subjects experiment in which they were orally administered levodopa or a placebo before reading a text. After reading the text, participants reported on their attentional control during reading and completed comprehension questions. Pharmacologically increasing DA levels in the brain negatively influenced reading comprehension. This effect was moderate (ηp2 = .13). No interaction effects of condition and DRD4 genotype were found, for either attentional control or reading comprehension. Exploratory analyses showed that increased DA levels in the brain positively influenced fluctuations in attentional control, but only in a group of slow readers. No effects of increased DA were found for the two other attentional control measures used in the present study and no effects of increased DA on attentional control were found for fast readers. Results are discussed from the perspective of the inverted U-shape theory and the possible dopamine-related mechanisms.