Children’s Learning From Interactive eBooks: Simple Irrelevant Features Are Not Necessarily Worse Than Relevant Ones

= 103) using one of the three eBook formats: non-interactive control, interactive-relevant, interactive-irrelevant. The book formats differed only in the manner in which the story advanced from one page to the next: children observed the experimenter turn the page (non-interactive), children touched a relevant image on the screen (relevant-interactive), or children touched an irrelevant image on the screen (irrelevant-interactive). Novel word learning and story comprehension were assessed with post-tests in which children picked target objects from an array and sorted story events into their original sequence, respectively. Findings indicate that word learning and story comprehension were similar across all three books, suggesting that simple interactive features - whether relevant or irrelevant to the story - had little impact on preschoolers' learning in this controlled experiment. Thus, simple interactivity that does not disrupt the story also does not hinder ongoing story comprehension.