What we have learned about learning to read in a digital age and children's contemporary reading experiences

Children need to be able to understand what they read in order to learn in school and participate in society. Increasingly, children are experiencing reading on screens. They are using more types of screens, for more purposes and for longer durations than ever before, with this trajectory only increasing during the COVID-19 pandemic (Moore et al., 2020). The question of how children read on screens is an important one. Meta-analyses consistently show that adults have stronger reading comprehension when reading on paper than in digital format (Clinton, 2019; Delgado et al., 2018; Kong et al., 2018), with suggestions of greater scanning and more superficial reading on screens (e.g., Lauterman & Ackerman, 2014; Liu, 2005). In this special issue, we were motivated to bring together a set of studies on digital reading in children because of the dire need to understand their efficacy and experiences of digital reading, given that children are effectively the ‘digital natives’. Building on the RAND Reading Study Group's (RRSG, 2002) report, Coiro (2021) proposed broadening each of the four elements – the text, the reader, the reading activity and the social context – to encompass features of reading in the digital context. Here, we place the papers included in this special issue within this organisational framework, focusing on the influence of features of the text, the reader and the reading activity. All studies, of course, belong in the current social context of a society in which readers are heavily influenced by digital devices. Several studies in the special issue explore how the digital features of text influence children's reading. These studies range in their focus from those on digital features (e.g., Krenca et al., 2024; Son & Butcher, 2024) to the simple presence of a screen (Dotan & Katzir, 2024). In a systematic review, Hare et al. (2024) offer a careful analysis of these features across more than 80 studies. Son and Butcher took on the question of how the digital features of the texts influenced preschool children's enjoyment and story comprehension of digital storybooks. The authors found that animations that highlighted details of the illustrations hindered comprehension. Animations highlighting elements of the storyline improved comprehension for a less difficult storybook; for a more difficult storybook, the facilitative effect of storyline element animations was only observed for children with strong vocabulary. Interestingly, and contrary to expectations, adding animations did not increase children's enjoyment. The findings point to caution against adding ‘bells and whistles’ to digital texts; animations need to focus on the story to be understood to be helpful, and removing them appears to come at no cost to children's enjoyment. Krenca et al. explored the influence of individual digital features on reading comprehension in English-speaking children in Grades 3–5. Using a within-subjects design, the authors contrasted the influence of two most prominent digital features: scrolling and hovering hyperlinks providing definitions. Results showed that levels of reading comprehension were lower in conditions that included hovering hyperlinks. These findings emerged despite the fact that the definitions were offered for low-frequency words in the texts with an eye to supporting reading comprehension. The results, like those of Son and Butcher, encourage caution in adding digital features with the expectation that these features will always encourage stronger reading comprehension. As the authors point out, processing digital features can increase cognitive load, reducing the resources available for comprehension. Dotan and Katzir examined levels of reading comprehension and preferences in paper versus digital contexts in Hebrew-speaking children in the second and third grades. In this large-scale study with over 200 children in each grade, no significant differences in levels of reading comprehension emerged between the two contexts. The study focused on contrasting levels of comprehension in the two mediums – paper versus digital devices – with no manipulation (or addition) of digital features. The lack of differences in levels of comprehension between the two modalities needs to be taken seriously as similar patterns have emerged in this age range (e.g., Doty et al., 2001; Florit et al., 2022; see also Hare et al. for a review), potentially pointing to a shift in pattern of a typical screen inferiority effect observed in older readers (see Clinton, 2019). It is also possible, as the authors note, that effects are shifting as a result of increasing digital exposure among readers (Mason et al., 2020). Interestingly, the authors also found that children generally preferred to read on digital devices, at least when inspecting the means numerically. Hare et al. conducted a systematic review of how the presence of digital features influences levels of reading engagement and comprehension. The authors carefully classified the studies reviewed based on three major characteristics, including participant-level (e.g., grade/age and language), task-level (e.g., text genre) and study-level (e.g., publication recency and study quality) characteristics. As the authors summarise, in terms of engagement, children appeared to prefer digital media. In terms of reading comprehension, more studies observed no difference between digital and print mediums, but there were variations in results across studies depending on the characteristics. For example, none of the studies involving younger children observed a print superiority effect, whereas none of the studies involving high schoolers reported a digital benefit. These findings emphasise the need to look carefully at the characteristics of a study under investigation. The summative tables offered in this systematic review will be invaluable to future researchers examining how digital features could influence reading comprehension. Several studies in the special issue point to the possible influence of differences within the reader. For instance, the findings of Dotan and Katzir point to the possibility of lower reading comprehension levels in digital contexts than on paper, specifically in poorer readers. These findings need to be interpreted with caution, as the interaction was nonsignificant and the pattern emerged in only one of the two grades. Similarly, although Nastasiuk et al. (2024) reported a pattern of similar parental reading behaviours across their age range of 0–5 years, we expect that studies with larger samples might pull out developmental differences. In their systematic review, Hare et al. showed that relative performance on digital and print mediums may vary depending on children's age and native language. For children with disabilities, the specific type of disability (e.g., autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD]) may also lead to different results. While most studies in the special issue focused on native speakers of a language, two studies examined digital reading among second language learners (Abuosbeh et al., 2024; Murphy & Arciuli, 2024). Abuosbeh et al. explored the impact of digital learning among children learning French as a second language. They did so by comparing a cohort of children in Grades 1 and 2 who received online instruction during the pandemic with those who learned in person before the pandemic. The online cohort showed a disadvantage in French vocabulary but was comparable to the in-person cohort on other French measures as well as most English measures. The authors argue that online learning may have a moderate negative effect on vocabulary but not other literacy measures (e.g., word reading and phonological awareness) for second language learners. In a systematic review, Murphy and Arciuli examined the effects of technology during reading comprehension instruction among school-aged children learning English as an additional language. The 53 studies reviewed offered instruction on either reading skills critical for comprehension (e.g., decoding and vocabulary) or comprehension strategies (e.g., monitoring and using online dictionaries). Digital instruction led to significant gains in reading comprehension in 32 studies, though the quality analysis revealed variability with respect to the rigour of the research design. In general, the findings point to the importance of leveraging technology to improve reading comprehension for children who learn English as an additional language. Building on these trends and nuances, we think that exploring differences within the reader will be essential in future studies. We encourage investigations in children with ADHD and autism (e.g., Sorenson Duncan et al., 2021), as well as in children with poor word reading (Deacon et al., 2019) and/or poor reading comprehension (e.g., MacKay et al., 2017). Research could also be extended to adults with a history of reading difficulties (e.g., Bergey et al., 2019; Elgendi et al., 2021). Future research could also explore digital reading in children from diverse linguistic backgrounds, including children who speak different first languages and children who are bilingual or multilingual learners (e.g., Choi et al., 2017; Chung et al., 2018). By their nature, studies of the digital context invite investigations into the influences of the reading activity and its social context, and researchers in this special issue have taken on these challenging questions. Meoded Karabaonov and Aram (2024) examined parent–child writing interactions with a smartphone for Israeli preschool children and their parents. In doing so, the authors extend a focus on the reading and writing activity itself into the social context of children's home lives. The homes of these middle-class children were technology rich, and they engaged regularly with digital devices. Most intriguingly, the authors found that the quality of writing support in a digital context offered by parents facilitated children's literacy skills even beyond parents' general involvement in selecting digital content. In contrast, the extent of children's independent digital activities was negatively related to their literacy skills. These findings reinforce the value of parents' direct engagement in digital activities, both in scaffolding writing and in supporting digital decisions. Also diving into how the digital reading activity looks in the home context, Nastasiuk et al. explored the nature of parents' shared book reading with paper books versus digital devices through an online survey. Parents reported engaging in more meaning-related activities on paper than on screens and more code-related activities on screens than on paper. Nastasiuk et al.'s findings of an increased emphasis on the meaning of the text over the print while reading paper books replicate prior studies (e.g., Hindman et al., 2014), and here, the authors showed that these effects were in fact flipped in a digital context, in which there was a greater emphasis on the code. The results help us to understand the influence of the affordances of the medium on shared book reading practices; reading on a screen appears to shift parents', and potentially children's, attention to the print. Both the meaning of the text and the print are important to reading development (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002); as such, reading on paper and screens each have something to offer in developing reading skills. We encourage others to build on the findings reported in this special issue. One important direction for future research will be to move beyond comparing reading with and without screens, as in the now classic meta-analyses (e.g., Delgado et al., 2018). We think that it is important to investigate systematically the influence on reading of the number and type of interactive features (e.g., dictionaries, games or sounds) that can be activated in any number of ways (e.g., via click or touchscreen). Krenca et al. reported on a simple way to do so with manipulations of standardised measures of reading comprehension. We are sure that others will find new ways to do so, including investigating the influences of digital features across the wide range of digital formats that children experience, as well as the length and types of texts being read. Another focus for future research will be on how children build comprehension in digital environments. Coiro (2021) defined digital reading as ‘… a range of multifaceted meaning-making experiences whereby readers engage with multiple texts for particular purposes that are situated in diverse contexts’ (p. 12). This definition reminds us that reading on digital devices often involves reading across multiple texts. With classic models of reading comprehension emphasising integration within a text (e.g., Kintsch, 1988), this new medium pushes these ideas to the next level: of just how children (and adults) do so across multiple texts. Exploring this question will likely involve methodological innovation as well as measurement of the increased cognitive demands associated with digital reading. The goal of this special issue was to explore the impact of modality on children's reading comprehension so that we can understand the roles of the four core elements of the reading process as they play out in a digital environment. Theoretically, the results from these papers push towards an understanding of how digital features impact children's reading comprehension in a generation that is increasingly learning to read in a digital environment. In terms of practice, these papers inform what type of media content parents and teachers could encourage to best support children's reading development.

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