Tech-Enhanced Storybooks – Lisa Goochee

It was interesting to read the piece by Takacs, Stuart, and Bus on the interactive media in technologically enhanced story books. The differences between multimedia features of text, storybook interactivity, or just audio were interesting regarding cognitive load and memory or comprehension of text. It makes a lot of sense that the additional stimuli can trigger more emotional response and thus be more generative in terms of retention and thinking about text.

Similar to last week’s readings, I was drawn right to the language regarding “disadvantaged children” in relation to tech in this article and wondered what this meta-analysis meant to convey through naming them and clumping them all together. In the abstract, they stated that disadvantaged children have “less stimulating family environments,” but later define what the “disadvantaged children” group was made of:

Participants consisted of a broad range of disadvantaged children with different risk factors like low SES; second language learner immigrants; children with small vocabularies in addition to struggling beginning readers; and children with learning disabilities, severe language impairments, special needs and developmental delays. Thus, they were not a homogeneous group of children, and technological additions may have different effects for different risk statuses (e.g., Smeets et al., 2012). More specific results were reported for groups of disadvantaged children who are at risk for developing language delays and learning problems and for groups showing delays and difficulties.