Read Create Share (RCS): A new digital tool for interactive reading and writing
Introduction
We are all familiar with the unprecedented revolution of Gutenberg's printing press: the introduction of the printed book, the democratization of knowledge, and the massive circulation of information. Much has been said about how digital media have effected a similar paradigm shift in reading and writing (Bolter, 2001, Bus and Neuman, 2009, Lankshear and Knobel, 2006), especially among children. Yet scholars have only begun to explore how digital media can transform children's experiences with the four language abilities of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. “Ideally,” says Bob Stein, founder of The Institute for the Future of the Book, “the boundaries between reading and writing will become ever more porous as readers take a more active role in the production of knowledge and ideas” (Stein, 2013).
For years scholars have suggested integrating the skills of reading and writing. There is ample research supporting the relevance of combining reading and writing in grade school. The four language abilities are said to develop in “overlapping and parallel waves rather than in discrete, sequential stages” (Berninger, 2000), and share cognitive abilities such as working memory, linguistic cohesion, morphological knowledge (Shanahan, 2006), metaknowledge, domain knowledge, knowledge about text attributes and procedural knowledge. (Fitzgerald & Shanahan, 2010). The reading–writing relationship appears to be bi-directional (Berninger et al., 2002, Shanahan and Lomax, 1986), meaning that the skills can be mutually beneficial when practiced together, and it is believed that writing is affected by oral language (Shanahan, 2006) and that orally-driven practices can be a potent tool for encouraging emergent literacy (Purcell-Gates, 2001). Studies have also found a relationship between poor reading comprehension and poor narrative or story construction skills (Cain, 2003, Cain and Oakhill, 1996), confirming the notion that these skills are complementary and, as such, may be taught together with positive results (Shanahan, 2006).
Over thirty years ago, Robert Tierney and David Pearson (1983) put forth the “composing model of reading,” which conceives of reading and writing as “similar processes of meaning construction.” This model posits reading as an act of composing similar to writing, requiring the reader to take an active role in the reading experience (Tierney & Pearson, 1983). Texts, they say, are “written and read in a tug of war between authors and readers,” (Tierney & Pearson, 1983) because “readers as well as writers compose meaning, and in fact there is no meaning on the page until the reader decides there is” (Tierney & Pearson, 1983), echoing Lev Vygotsky's theories of co-construction and culturally shaped content construction (Vygotsky, 1980) as well as Umberto Eco's theory of the open work (Eco, 1989) and Paul Valéry's declaration that “a poem on paper is nothing more than a piece of writing that may be used for anything that can be done with a piece of writing” (Valéry, 1952).
In the growing dossier of research on technology for supporting literacy learning, relatively little has been done to study the connection between reading and writing. In a broad sense, conclusions remain tentative. Long-term effects for technology-based literacy tools are unknown (Moody, 2010), and the few meta-analyses of digital reading studies show small effect sizes for literacy improvement in the elementary years (Cheung and Slavin, 2012, Zucker et al., 2009). Few studies can categorically state that a given technological tool “works” for a particular skill or grade level, but the research to date does offer abundant experimental evidence regarding the architectures and devices used in technological literacy tools that seem to support learning, and those that seem to be impediments.
For example, researchers looking at literacy learning in preschool and early elementary education conclude that technology has promise for improving children's incipient literacy (De Jong and Bus, 2003, Korat et al., 2010, Labbo and Kuhn, 2000, Lefever Davis and Pearman, 2005), as long as developers avoid “inconsiderate” multimedia options that interfere with learning by overloading kids' working memory (Verhallen, Bus, & De Jong, 2006); encouraging them to rely on audio narrations rather than decode words themselves (Zucker et al., 2009); and distracting them with anecdotal features and games (De Jong and Bus, 2002, De Jong and Bus, 2003, Labbo and Kuhn, 2000).
More recently, studies have begun to shed light on how elementary schoolers' language skills might be improved by the integration of computers and/or tablets. Some studies have focused on tablet applications to gain insight into what kinds of structural designs support literacy learning (Biancarosa and Griffiths, 2012, Falloon, 2013); how kids interact with tablets (Falloon & Khoo, 2014); and what teachers and schools have learned about linking tablet-based software to curricular goals (Crichton et al., 2012, Hutchison et al., 2012). Mobile applications have been tested to study how they support English-language learners (Billings & Mathison, 2012), and encourage story-building activities (Kucirkova, Messer, Sheehy, & Fernandez Panadero, 2014). Two recent studies show how technological tools may encourage elementary schoolers' reading and writing skills (Lysenko & Abrami, 2014) and composition skills (Goth et al., 2010), and another one revealed that among preschoolers, ebooks produced better results in vocabulary acquisition than print books (Ihmeideh, 2014). In general the studies are limited in scope, but offer insight as to which approaches and technologies are helpful and which are hindrances to literacy learning.
The study of literacy learning has been made even more complex as the definition of literacy in the 21st century is itself in a process of flux, challenging traditional notions of reading and writing. As digital media have increasingly compartmentalized information into discrete, immediately delivered packages, many experiences of reading and writing today are wholly different from what they were just a few decades ago, primarily in that they are far less linear and solitary practices (Graesser & McNamara, 2012). This reality has given rise to concepts such as “multiliteracies,” (Cazden et al., 1996, Cope and Kalantzis, 2000, Unsworth, 2001); “new literacies” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006) and “digital literacy” (Gilster, 1997, Merchant, 2007), terms that describe both conceptual notions concerned with the ability to assimilate information on technological platforms (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006, Merchant, 2007), as well as more operational notions of the skills needed to perform effectively in the digital environment, such as those espoused by the Global Digital Literacy Council (Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). While this study is concerned primarily with the first concept, of assimilating information on technological platforms, an underlying goal is to encourage children's digital literacy in the operational sense as well.
Over the past few decades, book publishers and digital media developers have been trying to re-invent the book. There exists a wide variety of technologically enhanced texts, from simple ebooks to Augmented Reality (AR) books and a range of applications and platforms that add new dimensionalities to the reading experience (Weedon, Miller, Franco, Moorhead, & Pearce, 2014). Few, however, open a dimension of interactivity that didn't exist before.
Interactivity, co-construction and multimodality have long been present in children's books. Interactivity is the central element of such classic pop-up books as Pretty Polly (Bingham & Nesbit, 1897) or Animal Life in Fact, Fancy and Fun (Giraud, 1938), which invite readers to engage actively with folds, flaps, and pull-out tabs that reveal content and sometimes even transform it, as in the “dissolving illustrations” of Peep Bo Pictures (Nister & Thompson, 1898), or a question-and-answer book like The Puzzle Picture Book (Bingham, 1900), with questions that the reader “answers” by pulling a tab. Co-construction also has a long tradition in print books (Dresang & McClelland, 1999), with examples like Tuesday (Wiesner, 1991); Black and White (Macaulay, 1990), and Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (Willems, 2003), which use different strategies that ask the reader to complete what the author has started—to co-construct with the author (Vygotsky, 1980). These books turn the classic linear narrative upside-down but are limited by the print medium, since the co-construction they facilitate can only occur in the reader's mind.
In addition to providing interaction and co-construction, children's books in print format have also always been multimodal, communicating ideas through text as well as other modes. Linguists Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen have elaborated now-essential theories around the way modes other than text—still and moving images, sound, hyperlinks, animation, video, and other modes yet to be developed—tell stories and transmit messages (Kress, 2003, Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). At present, multimodality is especially interesting with regard to children, for its documented use in supporting literacy learning (Harste, 1984, Jewitt, 2008, Siegel, 2006), given that human communication is essentially multimodal (Kress, 2010), and also because in recent decades, the fields of literacy and communications have been revolutionized by new modes of expression that defy the notion of the text as the pre-eminent form of communication (Kress, 2003, Weedon et al., 2014). There is a growing body of research supporting the importance of encouraging young people's sensitivity to and mastery of multimodal expression (Gee, 2007, Kress, 2000, Reiss and Young, 2013, Unsworth, 2001).
Children's books typically use both text and image to communicate messages, and books such as Pat the Bunny (Kunhardt, 1940) incorporate textured elements that communicate through touch, while books like The Very Lonely Firefly (Carle, 1995) use pulsated light, and books like those in the Simple First Sounds (Priddy, 2010) series use sound elements to communicate messages. Books like Color (Heller, 1999) use primary color transparencies to teach colors, while How to Write Codes and Send Secret Messages (Petersen, 1966) and Magic Window Storybook (Burrows, 1954) use transparencies to reveal “hidden” content. These are just a few examples of the multimodalities that were integrated into books and other publications long before digital formats became a so-called “game changer,” to use Geist's term (Falloon, 2013).
Books in digital format have incorporated interactivity and multimodality but very few have taken advantage of co-construction as a potential game changer. The earliest models of digital books featured a PDF-style format that mimicked the print reading experience. In children's literature, publishers began integrating multimedia components such as text-to-speech, hyperlinks, games, video, and animation (De Jong and Bus, 2002, Korat, 2010). A few years after the dawn of the PDF-style ebook, iBooks Author and similar models allowed writers to incorporate text, sound, moving image, 3D objects and widgets to a preexisting template (Weedon et al., 2014), producing a wildly multimodal reading experience, like that of Al Gore's Our Choice (Gore, 2009). Augmented Reality (AR) books bridge the print-digital frontier through print books enhanced by mobile applications that allow the reader to see and do things through a digital looking-glass/reading device, as in the case of iSolar System (Carlton Kids, 2013) or The Night of the Living Dead Pixels (Les éditions volumiques, 2013), and both tablet- and web-based storybooks have also emerged, offering book-game experiences in which puzzles, multimedia and prompts advance the narrative, as in the case of Device 6 (Flood, 2014), Year Walk (Simogo, 2014), or Inanimate Alice, (Inanimate Alice, 2005-8). These digital books offer interactivity and multimodality but not co-construction. They remain a one-way conversation from author to reader, with interactive multimodal cues along the way, pre-defined sets of possibilities that do not invite the reader's own creative input.
Fanfiction, a genre that has existed for years in print (Jenkins, 1992, Black, 2005), is one emerging digital field that does offer co-construction. In online fanfiction, fans of original works of fiction create spinoffs of books, producing new works online that may include text, art, video and games (Black, 2005, Chandler-Olcott and Mahar, 2003). They have been called “transformative,” because they “take an original artifact and turn it into something with a new function or expression.” (Curwood, Magnifico, & Lammers, 2013). Research shows that fanfiction, by giving readers a creative outlet, is a powerfully motivating user-generated literary genre that encourages literacy (Curwood et al., 2013) and studies suggest that educators adopt fanfiction practices (Chandler-Olcott and Mahar, 2003, Curwood et al., 2013) as well as other forms of digital writing to support young people's developing literacy (Merchant, 2005).
International tests such as PISA and SERCE reveal how, in many parts of the world, elementary and middle school students are struggling to read and write (OECD, 2010, OECD, 2013; Regional Bureau for Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, UNESCO, 2008). One report issued by PISA suggests that parents and educators work to “instill a sense of pleasure in reading by providing reading materials that students find interesting and relevant” and that reading on a digital format “could be exploited to start a ‘virtuous cycle’ through which more frequent reading of digital texts would result in better digital reading proficiency, which, in turn, would lead to greater enjoyment of reading and better proficiency in print reading, as well”.
Such a virtuous cycle can only be generated if children are genuinely motivated to read. There is copious research on the ways motivation can improve learning outcomes in general and reading outcomes in particular (Baker and Wigfield, 1999, Cordova and Lepper, 1996, Gambrell, 1996, Guthrie et al., 1999, Guthrie et al., 2007, Lee, 2014). Motivation in reading is said to be prompted by “drawing the reader into deeper engagement with the text—in a phrase, active processing” (Perfetti, Landi, & Oakhill, 2005), and the use of technology has been cited as a potential source of motivation for struggling readers (Adam and Wild, 1997, Kamil et al., 2000). In order to be motivated to read, children must be engaged with what they are reading. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory (1990) seems like the best description of what engaged reading is. Csikszentmihalyi identified eight essential factors that contribute to an experience of flow, among them concentration, clear goals, immediate feedback, deep involvement, and a loss of self-awareness (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, Sweetser and Wyeth, 2005), resulting in high performance and little concern for one's surroundings (Finneran and Zhang, 2005, Geirland, 1996, Kiili et al., 2012). This experience is familiar to anyone who has ever read a book in one sitting or stayed up all night writing; in fact, reading was one of the many activities that Csikszentmihalyi researched in his quest to understand flow experiences (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, Sweetser and Wyeth, 2005).
How might flow be triggered to support elementary schoolers' incipient literacy practices? Scholars such as James Gee, Guy Merchant (Gee, 2007, Merchant, 2005) and others (Apperley and Beavis, 2011, Apperley and Walsh, 2012) have looked at the vast culture of video games to identify the elements that encourage the flow experiences that they elicit, and Gee (2007) has outlined ways in which video games support language and literacy learning. The most compelling video games create contexts in which users become immersed in an absorbing, alternate reality (Christou, 2014, Klimmt, 2003, Yee, 2006). In her study of “fun” in video games, Federoff (2002) showed how game mechanisms that “get the player involved quickly and easily” create a positive user experience.
The research mentioned herewith supports the notion of strengthening the link between reading and writing to improve literacy education. The evolving definition of literacy itself now entails a dimension of digital mastery in both a conceptual and operational sense. These considerations, coupled with the need to engage and motivate elementary schoolers to read and write, led us to the purpose of this study, which is to address and answer the question of how the use of tablet applications (that incorporate in their design the principles of interactivity, co-construction, and multimodality already present in some children's books) may help to improve children's experience with reading and writing.
The principal aim of this paper is to present the development of a new tablet application designed, precisely, to integrate and improve third graders' reading and writing skills. A secondary aim is to present some preliminary findings regarding the ways in which the study participants approached the software and constructed with it their narratives. For this purpose we present Read Create Share (RCS), the digital tool we designed to answer the research question (Section 2); the methodological approach we used to develop the tool and the research context in which we tested and explored users' experience of the tool (Section 3). This is followed by the results we obtained from our experimental work (Section 4), and a discussion of their implications (Section 5). We answer our research question in the conclusions (Section 6) and finally, we identify the limitations of the present project and suggest ideas for future work (Section 7). These two sections are followed by Acknowledgments and References.
Section snippets
Tool description
Read Create Share (RCS) is a three-phase reading, drawing and writing tablet application that is a literary variant of the open musical compositions identified by Umberto Eco in The Open Work. Eco describes musical works composed in such a way that they are “quite literally ‘unfinished’: the author seems to hand them on to the performer more or less like the components of a construction kit … unconcerned about the manner of their eventual deployment” (Eco, 1989), to allow the musician to
Design-based research
Given the many questions RCS raised in terms of theory, design and implementation, we adopted a design-based research model (Bannan-Ritland, 2003, The Design-Based Research Collective, 2003) that allowed us to establish and refine our proposal as we honed the RCS tool. We first focused on designing and implementing RCS in one context in order to understand users' behavior with the tool. Then, we brought it to another country to arrive at more general assertions about its efficacy through
RCS Stage 1
A number of key findings were made as a result of the first intervention in Santiago, Chile, RCS Stage 1.
Usability observations revealed that few participants reacted negatively (either verbally or non-verbally) to the software. Observers' field notes indicate that a majority of participants were highly concentrated throughout the session.
RCS Stage 1 allowed us to detect a number of problems with the users' adoption of the RCS software. While users had little difficulty assimilating the Read
Discussion
In both Stage 1 and Stage 2, the fact that participants were able to maintain their focus on the activity during the experimental session was particularly interesting given that in a post-treatment questionnaire, very few participants identified reading or writing as preferred after-school activities. This was a very positive result for the RCS/RCW model given the below-average scores in reading for both Chile and Costa Rica in the most recent PISA evaluations (OECD, 2010, OECD, 2013).
Regarding
Conclusions
The aim of this paper is to present the development of a new tablet application designed to integrate and improve third graders' reading and writing skills. Our challenge was to devise a tool that might change elementary schoolers' reading experience in a meaningful way, given the omnipresence of screens and technology in everyday life that compete with (and seem to win out over) the more traditional pleasures of reading and writing. The challenge: what could technology do that would be
Limitations and future work
A first limitation of this project was that we chose to train research assistants, rather than teachers, to conduct the experiments. Results might have been different had we trained teachers, or connected the activity to a graded curricular content. Future work might include training teachers to use and administer the RCS/RCW software themselves, as teacher involvement with and training in technology is firmly suggested by a variety of researchers (Hutchison and Reinking, 2011, Schugar et al.,
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Center for Research on Educational Policy and Practice, Grant CIE01-CONICYT, and the Latin American and Caribbean Collaborative ICT Research Federation (LACCIR). We would also like to express our gratitude to the students, teachers and school administrators who very generously lent their time and energies to this project.
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