Electronic Books

Electronic Storybooks

The best traditional books contain illustrations that stimulate the readers' interest, help explain features of the text, or extend the readers' understanding. Electronic books often contain static illustrations that serve these purposes, too. But multimedia technology makes it possible to enhance books with animation, sound effects, and music. These enhancements could be a boost to readers' comprehension by providing multiple representations of a concept or by offering a means to illustrate difficult ideas independent of challenging language.

Clever and engaging animation is a big selling point in many of the electronic storybooks now on the market. However, not all illustrations and animations are equally effective at promoting text comprehension. In some cases, enhancements may prove more distracting than instructional. In two studies of second graders, half of whom were learning disabled, we (Okolo, in preparation; Okolo & Hayes, 1996) found that students spent almost four times longer reading and exploring an electronic story when it contained extensive animation than they did listening to and asking questions of an adult who read them a comparable story. Furthermore, we found that, even when prompted, students made minimal use of electronic book features that are hypothesized to support word recognition and facilitate reading comprehension. Despite the time spent with the highly animated electronic books, students' comprehension of them, as measured by responses to questions about the story's main idea and details, was poorer than their comprehension of adult-read stories or of less animated electronic books. Upon further analysis, we found that a significant proportion of the animation sequences in one highly animated story actually led students to draw erroneous conclusions about the text.

Lewis (1999) reported similar findings among a sample of 6 students with learning disabilities. Observations of these students as they used a variety of electronic storybooks showed that 43% to 70% of their time was spent in non-reading activities, such as investigating animation or playing games. Perhaps as a consequence, students in this study did not make appreciate gains in reading skills. In a second study, Lewis provided varying levels of support to electronic storybook readers and found that increasing the instructional demands associated with storybook reading (e.g., requiring that students read each page and 3 individual words per page to a predetermined criteria) resulted in increased word recognition gains.