Press, swipe and read: Do interactive features facilitate engagement and learning with e‐Books?

Abstract

Young children are introduced to mobile technology at an early age, with many using touchscreens daily. One appeal of touchscreen technology is that it seems to be intuitive for very young children. As a result, many children's e-books are designed for tablets rather than for e-readers or computers. E-books often contain hotspotsinteractive areas children can press to receive immediate auditory or visual feedback. This study assessed whether children's (N = 76, aged 3-5 years) interactions with hotspots increased their engagement with reading when using an e-book independently and how such interactions were related to their learning from the story. Our results suggested that interacting with hotspots enhanced children's emotional engagement and sustained visual attention but not verbal engagement. Interacting with hotspots also benefited children's recall of story elements relevant to the hotspot but not their overall comprehension of the story. These findings inform the design and use of touchscreen media in early childhood.

Dialogue with a conversational agent promotes children’s story comprehension via enhancing engagement

“…We coded four items on three dimensions of engagement: vocalizations (two items), affective expressions (one item), and visual attention (one item). This coding scheme was adopted from Xu et al’s ( 2020 ) study on young children's reading engagement. For each time segment, we coded whether each item was present (score of 1 if present and 0 if not present).…”

“…According to Guthrie and Klauda’s ( 2014 ) well‐cited framework, reading engagement consists of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive dimensions. Behavioral engagement refers to how attentive students are during the reading session and is usually measured by how much children visually attend to the reading materials; emotional engagement refers to students’ enthusiasm and feelings about what they are reading, and is usually measure by their emotional expressions; and cognitive engagement refers to a child actively thinking in order to comprehend the story and participate in discussion, and is often measured using vocalization as a proxy for cognitive engagement (Neuman et al, 2019 ; Troseth et al, 2020 ; Xu et al, 2020 ; Zhou & Yadav, 2017 ). A number of studies have suggested that increased reading engagement resulting from dialogic interaction is associated with enhanced outcomes.…”

Use of Mobile Applications in Developing Reading Comprehension in Second Language Acquisition—A Review Study

“…Reading skills in one's mother tongue are generally developed in the early stages of childhood. However, learning to read in a foreign language brings new challenges and requires different insights, so reading as a skill in English as Foreign Language (EFL) is still being researched [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Traditionally, reading together and listening are considered receptive skills, rather than being connected to speaking and writing as productive skills, but more recent research has studied the relationship of reading to different skills, most importantly the correlation between reading and writing [7,8].…”

Institutional Adoption and Implementation of Blended Learning: Differences in Student Perceptions

“…This study found blended learning can be effective to enhance learning engagement in and outside the classroom. Other scholars also have acknowledged how blended learning can promote students' active engagement in various learning contexts and have identified enhanced engagement as one of the key affordances of blended learning (e.g., Posey & Pintz, 2017;Wanner & Palmer, 2015;Xu, Yau, & Reich, 2020).…”