Scrolling and hyperlinks: The effects of two prevalent digital features on children's digital reading comprehension

• Published in: Journal of research in reading Vol. 47; no. 3; pp. 269 - 291
• Main Authors: Krenca, Klaudia, Taylor, Emily, Deacon, S. Hélène
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.08.2024
• Subjects: Children & youth; Elementary Education; Elementary school students; Elementary Schools; Meta-analysis; Reading acquisition; Reading comprehension; Reading Instruction; Reading Tests; Research design
• ISSN: 0141-0423; 1467-9817
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-9817.12468

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. Highlights What is already known about this topic Several meta‐analyses now show that reading comprehension on paper tends to be higher, particularly for informative texts, than when reading on a screen (e.g., Clinton, 2019; Delgado et al., 2018; Kong et al., 2018; Mangen et al., 2013; Singer & Alexander, 2017). What this paper adds We examine the effect of two specific features – scrolling and hovering hyperlinks providing definitions – on children's level of reading comprehension on screens. In a within‐participant experimental design using standardised measures, we find that hyperlinks providing word level information interfere with comprehension, with no negative impacts of scrolling. Implications for theory, policy or practice The results from this study offer new practical insights as to how digital features impact reading comprehension in a generation that is increasingly learning to read in a digital environment. On a methodological level, this study validates a simple way to modify standardised measures of reading comprehension to explore the impacts of digital features, an innovation readily adaptable to the exploration of many other digital features and age groups. On a theory level, these findings encourage the development of models of reading that consider features of digital texts along with the shallowing hypothesis, encouraging an integration of previously disparate theories of reading comprehension in order to fully understand children's reading of digital texts.