Parent–Child Joint Reading in Traditional and Electronic Formats

Reading Touch Screen Storybooks with Mothers Negatively Affects 7-Year-Old Readers’ Comprehension but Enriches Emotional Engagement

“…However, in contrast to Parish-Morris et al (2013) and Krcmar and Cingel (2014) we found no significant reduction in comprehension questioning, nor did we find a significant reduction on word scaffolding as reported by Lauricella et al (2014). Our child participants were at least 2–3 years older than the children in these previous studies, and mothers may have been less inclined to ask comprehension questions because of the more developed comprehension skills of 7-year-olds, particularly given the above average reading abilities of our sample.…”

“…As would be expected, there was a strong relationship between the frequency of reading printed books independently and the comprehension of the two storybooks in printed format, but perhaps surprisingly there was a negative relationship between the frequency of reading e-books independently and comprehension of the two storybooks in touch screen format. This effect of technology experience is similar to that reported by Krcmar and Cingel (2014), and is worthy of further exploration with a larger sample. Perhaps young children with more experience of reading interactive books pay greater attention to interactive features and games and less attention to the story.…”

“…Parents do not seem to have effective strategies to ameliorate the distractions of technology during shared reading, which is understandable given that sharing e-books is still a relatively infrequent activity compared to reading print books. Children’s familiarity with technology does not appear to diminish the distractions of technology in shared reading contexts; instead, children with greater experience of touch screen technology in Krcmar and Cingel’s (2014) study had poorer comprehension of touch screen storybooks, perhaps because they associated the technology with playing games rather than reading. More studies are needed to understand if school-aged children, who are becoming more skilled at following the narrative of a story, are better able to cope with the distractions of technology.…”

“…A study by Krcmar and Cingel (2014) found that the touch screen format by itself (in the absence of any interactive features, animations, or sounds) adversely affected the story comprehension of 2- to 5-year-olds compared to reading print storybooks, and resulted in fewer parent and child comments and questions about story content. The limited scaffolding by parents did not explain the lower comprehension scores, but comprehension was negatively affected by talk about the book format and environment, which happened more often in the touch screen condition.…”

“…Krcmar and Cingel (2014) explained pre-school children’s poorer comprehension of touch screen storybooks in a shared reading context by drawing on Fisch’s (2000) cognitive capacity model for learning from screens. Children are thought to have limited cognitive capacity to process the narrative of the story, so non-content related talk acts to increase the cognitive load on children and reduce the resources available to process story content.…”