The results were published today in Review of Educational Research, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.

The authors of the study, Natalia Kucirkova, May Irene Furenes and Adriana G. Bus, analysed the results of 39 studies that included a total 1,812 children between the ages of 1 and 8. For their analysis, the authors compared children’s story comprehension and vocabulary learning when they read a book on paper versus on screen, and assessed the effects of story-related enhancements in digital books, the presence of a dictionary, and the role of adult support. The bulk of the studies were carried out between 2010 and 2019, and for the greater part, in the last four years of that time span.

“The wide availability of digital reading options and the rich tradition of children’s print books beg the question of which reading format is better suited for young readers’ learning,” said Natalia Kucirkova, who is a professor of early childhood development at the University of Stavanger and The Open University and also one of the authors. “We found that when the print and digital versions of a book are practically the same and differ only in the voice-over or highlighted print as additional features in the digital book, then print outperforms digital.”

The authors found that the digital device itself and sometimes digital enhancements that are not aligned with the story content—such as a dictionary—interfere with children’s story comprehension.

When digital enhancements are designed to increase children’s ability to make sense of the narrative—for instance, by prompting children’s background knowledge to understand the story or providing additional explanations of story events—digital picture books not only outweigh the negative effects of the digital device but also outperform print books on children’s story comprehension.

Digitised versions are often inferior

“Our overall findings may reflect the rather low quality of enhancements in the digital books available for young children,” said Kucirkova. “Many digitised versions of picture books are inferior to the print version, yet young children widely use them.”

With a few exceptions, the commercially published digital books in the studies did not include storytelling techniques that adults provide during book sharing, for example attracting children’s attention to the main story elements and focusing their attention on the chain of story events.

“If we want to support all children, we need to understand the impact of digital books and make them of higher quality,” said Kucirkova. “Digital books are low-cost to access and thus more readily available to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Furthermore, we can customise digital books to a child’s level of learning by including interactive features responsive to the child.”

Production of digitised version needs more attention

“For reasons that need to be clarified by additional research, our meta-analysis shows that children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to be distracted from story content on digital books by their interactive features and by the reading devices themselves,” said Adriana G. Bus, a professor at the University of Stavanger. “As a result, these children are experiencing the most difficulty comprehending digital picture books.”

“Makers of children’s digital books need to be careful about the enhancements they make, and educators and parents need to choose carefully which digital books young children read,” said Kucirkova. “Internationally, it is important to promote the production of exemplary prototypes including text in a range of languages and provide incentives to publishers, authors, designers, and illustrators to change the status quo.”

The authors found that digitised versions may be more effective than print books for enhancing children’s vocabulary if the digital books use a dictionary that defines infrequently used words and expressions. However, digital dictionary features hinder children’s ability to understand the story they are reading, indicating that focussing attention on word meanings distracts children’s attention from the story content.

“This is further evidence that digital book designers need to exercise caution with seemingly small and popular additions that may be helpful for isolated outcomes such as vocabulary learning but hinder the reading session overall,” Kucirkova said.

■ This study was supported by a grant from the Research Council of Norway.

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Their graduates could go and fit in anywhere in the world and they get into some highly competitive schools like the United World Colleges and, in turn, the universities in the United States that the Davies Scholarship programme will take them to. One of the main causes is, I think, that they have two libraries in the school staffed by people who know the books well and are excited by them. The primary school library is probably the most attractive library I have seen outside of the American or British Schools of the metros and there are people in and out of the school almost daily who are reading to, talking to and listening to the children. This is what is propelling the children at Purkal to heights that many far more expensive schools are aiming for.

Why the habit of reading is so valuable

I have visited some fancy schools in this country where they have to unlock the library to let me in and have a look around [warning sign: if they are locking the books up, say thank you and look for another school]. When a city or a country builds libraries everything improves; literacy increases, time spent in school increases, domestic violence decreases, ire-offending rates drop and wellbeing grows. If a city has more prisons than libraries you know that there is something wrong; just hope that the prisons have libraries inside, otherwise they are less likely to be effective at reforming and rehabilitating.

If you want your child to get ahead in life, to develop their own ideas and benefit from the collective knowledge of centuries then there is one unbreakable rule: you must help them to become readers; not simply people who can read, but people for whom reading is as much a part of their lives as breathing; the quality of their lives depends on it. Developing a habit of reading is not only going to open up for them whole new worlds of enquiry, joy, interest, love, culture and empathy, but also create thinkers who will be able to draw on more experience than their relatively short, bounded lives will give them.

If a city has more prisons than libraries you know that there is something wrong

No matter how intelligent a child might be [and you can blame some of that on genetics] they will never get to the point of coding the next machine, learning Artificial Intelligence [AI] or designing a new state-wide system for collecting recyclables from first principles; we all have to stand on the shoulders of the giants who have got us to where we are today and they have usually written things down.

The very act of reading is also something that our children need to engage in so as to develop competencies and attributes that will help them in school, work and life; the practice of sitting still and travelling somewhere in your head, the act of turning the written word into something that can consume you or persuade others and grow an idea into a movement. Reading as a silent, personal activity is one path that our children must be able to follow, as is reading aloud, the path on which they can be joined by or include others.

Where and how to begin

Like all of our children’s habits and learned behaviours, they take their lead from us, their parents. If they are to find a love of reading, they will need you to share your love of it with them. If you don’t have a love of reading, recognise that it is one of the most valuable things you can give your child, and all it requires is the desire and the effort to start something that is good for both of you as a part of your daily routine. Think of it as mental nourishment and hygiene, in the same way you think of them eating their meals, taking a bath and brushing their teeth.

As soon as your child is able to sit up in your lap and focus on something that you hold in front of them, you should be reading to them. When children are very young I really don’t think it matters what you read to them, so long as you are there with them, making contact physically, with the spoken word and, as they get older, with the ideas you are sharing.

Like all of our children’s habits and learned behaviours, they take their lead from us, their parents

Read to your child in any language

When I talk about reading I am not talking about reading in English. Reading in our mother tongue and acquiring that language is going to have the same developmental effect on your child. It will also allow you to choose the books you remember from childhood and allow grandparents to be involved in reading too. There is no point in reading to your child in a language you cannot comfortably read. Once they have gained fluency in a language—and in some homes this will be two languages—you can introduce another. To begin with you can read the lovely board-books that you can find on Amazon’s ‘up to two years’ pages or you could well read yesterday’s financial report from the newspaper. If you do it with love and enthusiasm, it will be equally stimulating.

Do make sure it is print you are reading though, and not text from a screen. It is an entirely different kind of stimulation that is likely to lead to something that you don’t intend or want for your child.

When you start reading to your baby it will be the sound of your voice and your presence that makes the experience so nice for them, then it will be the pictures and the feel of the books that you are looking at together while you read. Eventually they will be able to decode some of the symbols that you are looking at and reading to them, and soon enough they will be able to catch you out if you read the wrong words; now they are starting to learn and remember the words, the first part of learning to read. It will be some years before they sit down with a book themselves and read it, so you are still their guide. Even when they do enjoy reading themselves, they will love being read to even more because by then having time with you will have become scarce, and it is back to the reassurance of the sound of your voice and you being next to them that they need.

Of course, this is never going to happen if you yourself don’t read or are not seen reading by your child. This is called modelling and children are remarkable at learning through modelling. They will learn your best and your worst behaviours, which you should try to recognize as feedback rather than something to get cross about.

“But who has the time to read?”

Sometimes parents get out of the habit of reading. I know that I read far more in the school holidays than I do during the term because other things get in the way. Reading is like exercise and I know from experience that other things get in the way of that too when I let them. I also know that I feel great when I am able to exercise regularly and what I have to do is make time for it; it is the same for reading. If our children see us sitting quietly, reading, then we will help them develop their capacity to sit quietly and learn to be happy, be alone with themselves, be at peace without being bored or needing to be entertained, played with or attached to a device. Developing a habit of reading also develops a habit of contentment.

Make the time, have books in the places that you sit to relax, have them in the bathroom, keep a fresh pile of books on the coffee table, not coffee table books, actual books. Homes that are devoid of books are too often devoid of the other things that books bring, and if you want to buy something for your child that will add value to them as people you should be reaching for a book. When you read something that resonates, makes an important point or you think makes a good teachable moment for your child then take the trouble to share it and read it to them. Sharing here still means reading to them. Giving them something to read might work but asking them to ‘listen to this . . .’ is going to continue to help them in learning how to read. You can do this no matter how old they are.

Developing a habit of reading also develops a habit of contentment

Parents should read to their children all the way through primary and into secondary school. Many parents stop reading to their children as soon as they are able to make the transition from reading out loud to reading to themselves. It’s too soon. You cannot be sure of what they are silently reading to themselves and they still have a great deal to learn from you. I certainly think that we should be reading out loud to our children into their young teens. It doesn’t need to be from the stories and novels that you read to them at bedtime in the past; now there is the world of classic fiction, op-ed pieces in the press and those LinkedIn, Aeon and HBS articles that have a key idea from which they can learn.

From the regular experience I have of listening to boys reading out loud when I step into classrooms or conduct them, you know that you have done your job and helped them become readers and thinkers. If you feel that your own reading is not as fluent as you would like your child’s to be, or that you are unable to do what it takes to make Ruskin Bond or Harry Potter come alive by acting out the characters’ voices [my theatrical wife was always so much better at this than me] then there are many good recordings of actors and authors reading their works. Listen to Robert Munsch reading The PaperBag Princess on YouTube, Vimeo and Spotify from the Children’s Audio Books playlist, to hear how it’s done. This is wonderful storytelling training for parents and it allows children to hear just how things ought to sound. Reading along with the book becomes another experience altogether.

Applications like YouTube and Spotify allow you to choose just what you want, but there are many good spoken word radio shows and podcasts that also gives the opportunity to hear language being spoken and used well. If you have friends or relatives who are not readers and you worry that their children might be disadvantaged or if you are involved in the education of children whose parents are not readers, then there are things that you can do to help. There are online and mail order book clubs for readers of all ages available in India.

Every city will have its book clubs, reader’s and writer’s clubs, literary festivals and book fairs. If you have access to a smartphone ,you can find an activity every month that you can do with your child, based on books. Publishers like Scholastic, that work around the world in both primary and secondary education sectors, establish book clubs with various schools, set up book fairs and have parent sections on their websites through which they share their age-appropriate reading material. There are also libraries, school-guided reading programmes, book lists and blogs to guide, advise and inform you about what’s out there to read. While many Indian kids I meet start with Enid Blyton and the Hardy Boys [an indication of what their school libraries and parents have on the shelves] there is much better and more relevant children’s literature available today. If you are not a reader but have got to this point in the article, well done; keep going and keep talking to your child about what they enjoy reading and what book they think you might enjoy next [apparently I need to read Norwegian Wood by Murakami].

If they don’t take to it right away then don’t give up, all children go through phases and that’s as true with reading as it is with friends, playthings and tastes. Be careful not to make reading a source of conflict—that would undo all the good work!

The post Why the habit of reading is so valuable (and how to introduce it to your child) appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

I cannot say about others but reading inspirational wisdom featured within Complete Wellbeing and elsewhere has helped me expand my awareness of myself as well as of the world. And isn’t awareness the only way one can bring about any transformation within oneself? Reading stimulates my mind and leads me to question the status quo and reflect on my thoughts, feelings and behaviour. I have become much more open-minded and a lot less rigid about my worldview. Yet, I must say that cobwebs accumulated over years cannot be cleaned in one sweep—it requires persistence. De-conditioning deep-rooted beliefs requires deep-rooted conviction and persistence.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of good reading to my life has been the sheer volume of unlearning I have gone through. Owing to the wisdom I have gained from reading inspirational stuff, I have managed to free myself—and continue to do so even now—from  hundreds of old, useless and outdated beliefs that didn’t serve my highest good.

I owe a lot to those who have shared deep insights about the various aspects of life—they have helped bring out my latent strengths, while simultaneously pointing out the weaknesses that hold me back. Reading has taught me that the heights of love, peace, joy and fulfilment are not reserved for a chosen few—they are available to anyone. Whether or not I end up reaching those heights depends only on one thing—my choice.

“An ideal life” doesn’t exist

Coming back to the question at the start, not only am I far from living the ideal life, I don’t think I’ll ever get there—for that’s not the goal. To repeat an old cliché, happiness is not a destination, it’s a journey. But I do believe it is possible to live a richer life than I am living now. I also know that there’s only one corner of the universe I have the power to change, and that corner lies in me. Through Complete Wellbeing, we try to bring this awareness to our readers.

And no, I don’t follow every advice given in Complete Wellbeing—it’s not even designed that way. It is structured in a way that allows us to choose the thoughts and ideas that resonate within and then experiment with them to find our individual truths. Knowledge can be transferred, but experience has to be gained firsthand. No matter how sound the advice, no one else can live my life for me. And what’s more, there’s no “ideal life”… there’s only a quest to learn, to grow and to evolve into a greater version of oneself.  It’s this quest that I am learning to cherish. What about you?

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Here’s my view on this subject. First, we need to convince parents of the benefits of reading for their child. If your child isn’t showing an interest in reading, you should consider the following reasons to get him to take up reading

• It helps build your child’s vocabulary and develops his language skills so that he is able to read, write and speak better.
• It improves focus. Reading requires children to sit quietly for a fairly long period of time, trying to concentrate on the story they are reading. The more they read, the better their concentration levels.
• Reading fuels your little one’s imagination. When children read about various concepts, characters, places and situations, they visualise the same in their imagination—just like adults do, only better! With practice, they get better at visualisation, which is a great creativity booster.
• Reading enables a child to excel in academics as it leads to a higher aptitude for learning. Studies prove that students who have been exposed to reading since preschool are more likely to do well academically. This happens because kids who are exposed to reading don’t have to struggle with comprehending words and sentences and can therefore easily focus on subjects like maths and science and grasp them better.
• Reading inculcates compassion and empathy in children by making them aware of the differences in this world. In real life, a child’s interaction is limited to people belonging mostly to similar socio-economic strata and having somewhat similar perspectives, thinking processes and issues. Reading exposes the child to a plethora of ways of living, different perspectives, thought processes and issues unknown to her. This contributes to her having a healthy and balanced outlook towards life.
• Reading can be a great way for children to keep boredom away. Whether it is visiting relatives’ places, waiting for a doctor’s appointment or attending weddings they are least interested in, all they need is a paperback and they are sorted. The happy side effect of this love of reading is that your child will be less drawn to TV and other gadgets which, according to emerging research, do no good leaving the mind numb and stressed with constant movement, flashing lights and bombardment of violent images and sound.

Ask questions and discuss the story, the characters and the illustrations with the child

What more can parents do besides buying good books for their children?

• Children learn their early life lessons by emulating their parents. So be a worthy role model to them. If your child sees you reading often and enjoying it, she will start to think of it as a pleasurable experience.
• A child is never too young to be introduced to books. For babies, there are board books and cloth books available which do not get damaged or torn with rough handling. Then there are “Touch and Feel” books to expose babies to different textures and patterns. For toddlers and preschoolers, one can begin read aloud sessions with the books of their interests. For my car and truck crazy son, I began with books about cars and trucks and then graduated him to books on other means of transportation.
• The first five years of a child’s life are crucial for development. Start by reading aloud to them for about 20 minutes everyday, preferably at a fixed time when both you and the child are in a relaxed state. Ask questions and discuss the story, the characters and the illustrations with the child.
• If your child repeatedly asks you to read the same book to him or her, always oblige. Do not suggest a new book if the child wants the same old book to be read. We may feel that it is getting monotonous but the child is learning something new from it with each reading. You can infuse a bit of creativity by reading the dialogues of the characters in different voice pitches each time. One may also be surprised how many different interpretations a child can come up with every time the same book is read.
• Continue reading aloud to your children even after they start reading independently as children love the relaxed and cosy feeling of their parents reading to them. This keeps their interest in reading alive.

• Support the child’s early literacy needs by making them join phonics classes which lay emphasis on sound recognition and blending letter sounds for reading words instead of the traditional  “look, memorise and read” method. The techniques adopted in such classes comprise of learning through audio/visual techniques, fun games and related activities. It is about making learning fun.
• Get a library membership for your child and visit it regularly with him. Let your child choose the books himself.
• While buying books online is great, especially for the discounts, make it a point to visit bookstores with your children once in a while so that they are surrounded by books and in the midst of other book lovers.
• Take your child to storytelling sessions and literary activities organised by bookstores or libraries. Subscribe to booklists to discover relevant reads for their age group and reading levels. There are many online communities which offer such booklists.
• Discuss with your children what you are reading [of course it has to be age appropriate]—doing so creates a reading environment at home.

The best gift you can give to your child is the life-long love for reading. The only important requirement is to view it as pleasure rather than a chore.

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