Development and Evaluation of Novel eBook Interface for Scaffolding Thinking Context in the Teaching of Writing

Effective reading strategies, including graphic organizers, question answering, story structure, etc., can help students through reading comprehension. However, those reading strategies are not fully support in both paper books and eBooks. Students, who master those reading strategies, can learn effectively. In contrast, students without effective reading strategies cannot grasp the thinking context and their learning outcomes of writing are not good enough. This study presents a novel eBook interface to show the thinking maps with question answering mechanism on the same page. The thinking maps and question answering mechanism will stimulate students to reflect on reading content, which is others' excellent composition, and help students reach better writing outcomes. This study was conducted by design-based research methodology. After iteratively refining the novel eBook interface implementation, 60 subjects were recruited for system evaluation. The experimental results show that students in the experimental group can significantly acquire more story structure and key vocabulary than students in control group. Also their subjective opinions show that they are satisfied with the thinking maps and question answering mechanism provided by domain experts.