A Collaborative Reading Annotation System for Promoting Reading Performance

As children now spend considerable time reading electronic media, digital reading skills and good reading comprehension are essential. However, many studies agree that screen-based reading leads to shallow reading, short attention spans, and poor comprehension. Therefore, this work presents a collaborative reading annotation system with a reading annotation and interactive discussion scaffold (CRAS-RAIDS) for improving reading performance in collaborative digital reading environments. This study used a quasi-experimental design. Fifty-three Grade 5 students were recruited from two classes of an elementary school in Taoyuan City, Taiwan. One class was randomly designated the experimental group used the proposed CRAS-RAIDS support for collaborative reading. The other class was designated the control group and used the traditional paper-based reading annotation method and face-to-face discussions. The two groups were then compared in terms of reading attitude, reading comprehension, and reading strategy in an active reading context. Analytical results show that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in direct and explicit comprehension, inferential comprehension performance, and reading strategy. Moreover, the experimental group, but not the control group, had a significantly improved reading attitude in the total dimensions and in the behavioral and affective sub-dimensions.