Heather Ruetschlin Schugar and her husband Jordan T. Schugar are both working at the West Chester University. They have conducted a study regarding the difference between the reading from a traditional book and the reading on an e-book. Thus, they have asked a number of middle scholars to participate in this study and to read the same text in one of the two options: on print or on an e-book. During the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia, the Schugars have presented the results: the ones reading printed books have perceived better the text meanings than the ones using an e-book.
During another study, the Schugars have noticed that young readers tend to skip the entire text and to occupy their time playing with the e-book’s interactive features.
The Schugars have also published another significant study along with their colleague Carol A. Smith in the journal The Reading Teacher. This previous paper is about observing teachers using e-books with kindergarten children and with pupils up to sixth grade.
Thus, the researchers found that young readers are attracted by the new technology. But in the same time, children cannot focus all their attention on the text because of the multitude features of the e-book. Because this one is overcharged with multimedia traits, it makes it difficult for the children to process the text entirely. In this way, their limited working memory gets overwhelmed and they lose the thread of the story. And this is how the benefits of the e-book become just a bunch of disadvantages in front of a kid.
The authors gave us some actual examples of e-books that distract the children’s attention from the text. In “Sir Charlie Stinky Socks and the Really Big Adventure” kids can make the animals move around the screen by touching a button. In the e-book “Rocket Learns to Read” there is a bird that flaps its wings and sings in the background.
These kinds of multimedia features fragment the children’s attention and prevent them from fully comprehending the text. Also, they can determine the readers not to pay attention to the text at all. The study has shown that children spend 43% of their time by playing the games found on their e-book and forget about the reading.
There are also e-books designed to improve the understanding of the texts. The authors give as an example the e-book “Miss Spider’s Tea Party”, where children can hear the sounds of Miss Spider drinking the tea as they read the said fragment; and the e-book “Wild About Books” where they can hear the characters laughing as they read how “Hyenas shared jokes with the red-bellied snakes”.
Because the virtual books for children are not checked like the printed ones, the researches recommend the parents to be more careful when choosing an e-book for their kid. It may be more difficult to find high-quality here, than in libraries.
Here are some tips given by the authors regarding the selection of e-books for children: choose e-books that offer a longer interaction with the text and less multimedia features; pick the ones that have very short animations and sounds; make sure that your e-book has a section dedicated to understanding the text, such as a vocabulary; also, make sure that all interactions are on the same page as the text and not separately.
The next step after choosing the right e-book is to help your children use the device. Show them how to handle the main functions and how to interact with the text.
The adults should also teach the children how to treat the virtual text. Even if they are not dealing with printed stories, they should know how to find the main idea of the texts and how to stay away from any distractions. They can use the multimedia features as much as they want, after they have completely read the text.
There are two e-book features that children should not abuse: the electronic dictionary and the read-to-me option. Both of them disrupt the reading and fragment the text. The dictionary will affect the children’s deduction ability – because by using it they won’t try to find a word’s meaning by themselves. The read-to-me option will determine them not to decipher the words on their own, and eventually not to read anymore.
In the end, the researches state that children are able to handle e-books almost without adult help. Anyway, these products require more attention from us than the printed books, due to their multimedia features and their unlimited access to other applications.
Here is a list with e-books recommended by the researchers:
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)
