ERIC Number: EJ1440592
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2024-Aug
Pages: 23
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0141-0423
EISSN: EISSN-1467-9817
Scrolling and Hyperlinks: The Effects of Two Prevalent Digital Features on Children's Digital Reading Comprehension
Klaudia Krenca; Emily Taylor; S. Hélène Deacon
Journal of Research in Reading, v47 n3 p269-291 2024
Background: This study examined how children's ability to understand what they read on screens is impacted by two specific digital features: hovering hyperlinks and scrolling. Methods: The participants were 75 English-speaking children (M = 9.90 years, SD = 0.90 years) in Grades 3 to 5 who participated in an online research study. Using a within-participants design, children read standardised passages from the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests (MacGinitie et al., 2000) and answered multiple-choice comprehension questions. In one condition, passages were presented without digital features referred to as the clicking condition; in another, children had to scroll to navigate through the passages, in a third, there were hyperlinks that provided a word definition when a participant hovered their cursor over a blue and underlined word, and a final condition included both scrolling and hyperlinks. Results: As expected, there was a significant main effect of grade on children's ability to understand what they read, with better performance for children in Grade 5 than 3. Critically, there was a significant main effect of condition on children's performance on the reading comprehension questions, with higher scores for the condition with no digital features compared with the conditions with hovering hyperlinks and both scrolling and hovering hyperlinks. Performance was similar between the clicking and scrolling conditions. There was no significant interaction between grade and condition, showing consistency in effects across the upper elementary school years. Conclusions: These findings could inform the optimal design of digital texts by identifying digital features that do and do not interfere with reading comprehension, with hyperlinks providing word level information interfering and scrolling having no negative impacts.
Descriptors: Hypermedia, Reading Comprehension, Digital Literacy, Children, Computer System Design, Grade 3, Grade 4, Grade 5, Reading Tests
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2191/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Early Childhood Education; Elementary Education; Grade 3; Primary Education; Grade 4; Intermediate Grades; Grade 5; Middle Schools
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Identifiers - Assessments and Surveys: Gates MacGinitie Reading Tests
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A