Electronic storybook design, kindergartners' visual attention, and print awareness: An eye-tracking investigation

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to understand children's visual attention during shared storybook reading when the print and picture area sizes are identical, as well as to understand which electronic storybook design is best able to increase children's attention to the print and their print awareness. To this end, we modified the electronic storybook's design, measured children's print awareness, and used an eye-tracker to measure children's visual attention during reading. Sixty-one 4–5 year old Taiwanese children's data were analyzed in this study. This study was conducted over a 6-week period: one week for pretest, four weeks of intervention, and one week for posttest. After the pretest stage, the kindergartners were split into three groups: traditional storybook, highlight synchronization (implicit instruction), and print discussion (explicit instruction). The results suggested that: First, when the print and picture area sizes were identical, children spent more than 19% of their time looking at the print area, substantially higher than previous studies (e.g. Evans & Saint-Aubin, 2005; Justice, Skibbe, Canning, & Lankford, 2005; Roy-Charland, Perron, Boulard, Chamberland, & Hoffman, 2015); second, the highlight synchronization design did entice children to look at the print more (from 19% to 38% reading time); third, exposure to either the reading highlight synchronization or the print discussion storybook designs for four weeks improved the children's print awareness.