Choose Your Own Adventure: Interactive E-Books to Improve Word Knowledge and Comprehension Skills

TL;DR

This study explores how interactive digital e-books with embedded comprehension strategies can enhance vocabulary and science understanding among elementary students, showing promising results across different strategies and engagement levels.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of using choose-your-adventure style e-books with embedded questions to improve vocabulary and comprehension skills in young learners.

Findings

Students showed significant gains in vocabulary and hurricane concepts.

No single strategy was superior in effectiveness.

Embedded questions correlated with better posttest outcomes.

Abstract

The purpose of this feasibility study was to examine the potential impact of reading digital interactive e-books on essential skills that support reading comprehension with third-fifth grade students. Students read two e-Books that taught word learning and comprehension monitoring strategies in the service of learning difficult vocabulary and targeted science concepts about hurricanes. We investigated whether specific comprehension strategies including word learning and strategies that supported general reading comprehension, summarization, and question generation, show promise of effectiveness in building vocabulary knowledge and comprehension skills in the e-Books. Students were assigned to read one of three versions of each of the e-Books, each version implemented one strategy. The books employed a choose-your-adventure format with embedded comprehension questions that provided students with immediate feedback on their responses. Paired samples t-tests were run to examine pre-to-post differences in learning the targeted vocabulary and science concepts taught in both e-Books. For both e-Books, students demonstrated significant gains in word learning and on the targeted hurricane concepts. Additionally, Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) revealed that no one strategy was more associated with larger gains than the other. Performance on the embedded questions in the books was also associated with greater posttest outcomes for both e-Books. This work discusses important considerations for implementation and future development of e-books that can enhance student engagement and improve reading comprehension.