Electronic Books

Electronically-Enhanced Content-Area Texts

As students progress through the grades, they are expected to have developed sufficient literacy skills to learn from texts and other printed materials. To do so, students must read text that often contains many unfamiliar words and technical terms, uses complex sentence structures, addresses novel content, and assumes a high degree of prior knowledge (Anderson-Inman & Horney, 1998). Content-area textbooks, in particular, have been criticized for their "inconsiderateness" (Armbruster, 1984) and thus can pose formidable difficulties for students with mild disabilities.

Researchers at the Center for Electronic Studying at the University of Oregon (Anderson-Inman, Horney, Chen, & Lewin, 1994; Horney & Anderson-Inman, 1994) are developing electronically enhanced versions of short stories taught in a middle-school literature class. The at-risk readers who used these electronic books could access vocabulary support in the form of definitions, pictures, and digitized pronunciations of words. Timelines and graphic overviews were provided to help students summarize and synthesize information. And different types of comprehension questions were embedded in the text to encourage the use of more sophisticated reading strategies. Students' systematic and purposeful use of these electronic resources was correlated with their comprehension of the stories (Anderson-Inman & Horney, 1993). Students most often made effective use of the electronic stories, moving through the text systematically and using electronic enhancements in an integrated manner. However, some students were observed to make infrequent use of the electronic resources; accessing them on the first few pages and then abandoning them while moving more quickly through the text itself. Other students were classified as "resource junkies," spending most of their time accessing electronic supports that they enjoyed, such as digitized pictures or sounds, without apparent attention to the relationship between these supports and the text (Horney & Anderson-Inman, 1994). The resource junkies showed minimal comprehension of the text (Anderson-Inman & Horney, 1993). This research suggests that students may require instruction and teacher monitoring in order to make the best use of electronic text.

Horney and Anderson-Inman, at the University of Oregon's Project Intersect, have created a set of digital books for middle and high school students that are available on the Internet. Books include texts used in history (The Diary of Opal Whitely), genetics (Your Genes, Your Choices), and literature (On the Run) classes, as well as Romeo and Juliet and source documents from American history (The Mayflower Compact, Common Sense). Resources to support comprehension, including illustrations and photographs, timelines, explanations, definitions, links to background and supplementary information, and reading strategies, enhance each book. The website contains the books, which can be used free of charge; an activity center with materials to assist the teacher including lesson plans, documents, ideas, and suggestions; and a developer's center with tools and templates for modifying or creating other web-based texts.

Talking Walls (Edmark) is an interactive software version of the book by the same name. It teaches students about walls around the world that have historic and cultural significance, such as the Berlin Wall, the Great Wall in China, and the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. The text can be read via digitized speech, a glossary provides explanations of difficult terms, and links are provided to Internet sites that contain additional information, including videos and virtual tools. A notepad features permits students to take notes about what they are learning.

Reference books, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias, can be daunting tools for students with reading and learning problems. Not only do these materials rely primarily on text to convey information, they are often written at challenging readability levels and require students to employ reading skills to locate information. Electronic reference books, available on the Web and CD-ROM, help circumvent some of these difficulties. Electronic reference books often contain alternative representations of information including pictures, movies, and audio clips, thus providing non-print based access to information. They usually employ some digitized speech for aural access to key information such as pronunciations of dictionary entries, and may provide additional support for difficult concepts by linking to definitions or explanations. Furthermore, users are no longer limited to indices or tables of contents in order to locate information, but can type in keywords or employ multiple search strategies. Many publishers now produce and distribute electronic reference materials. Some examples are Eyewitness History of the World Encyclopedia (Dorling Kindersley), Encarta 2003 (MSN), and American Heritage Children's Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin). Web sites, such as KidInfo, contain compilations of links to online electronic reference materials.