Empowering digital reading with e-book: The development of an E-book system for elementary school students based on learning task needs and visual fatigue assessment

Abstract

Screen-based reading with e-books has become more acceptable among digital natives and the greatest challenge to modern education is to leverage technology in order to create appropriate learning experiences for all students Due to the rapid adoption of tablet computers and other portable devices such as smartphones it is now possible to envisage the greater use of e-books to support more efficient and mobile personalized learning This is important as it is anticipated that e-books can eventually be used as learning tools to substitute for printed textbooks in the future While many studies have investigated e-books targeted to undergraduate students much less attention has been paid to children As such an Interactive E-book Reading System (IERS) incorporating e-books was developed in the current work to appeal elementary school students This study adopted the interactive principles of multimedia learning in order to empower students’ learning experiences with e-books while also relying on the expertise from a group of in-service teachers so that the system can better meet the students’ learning task needs An experiment was conducted with 166 elementary school students to evaluate the usability of the developed system and feedback was also collected from the students It was found that both the usability and functionality of the developed system were well-suited for most of the students Moreover the issues related to student visual fatigue need to be considered before e-books are widely adopted in an academic learning context Using a reading experiment conducted on 24 elementary school students this study examined how reading-related factors including reading materials reading duration affect visual fatigue when reading both e-books and paper books The results showed that different reading materials did not affect the students’ levels of visual fatigue and concerns about the heavy burden of visual fatigue seem overstated with regard to the change from printed to screen-based reading material However the findings on reading duration suggested that long periods of reading without proper rest should be avoided Based on this study we can conclude that the tailor-made e-book reading system developed in this study can help deliver a better learning experience to elementary school students Moreover the results also enable us to better understand how certain factors are associated with visual fatigue and thus can be used to make optimal usage suggestions for the application of e-books in education in order to achieve the potential benefits with regard to student learning

Date of Award	2018 Jan 9
Original language	English
Supervisor	Yueh-Min Huang (Supervisor)