Development and evaluation of a novel e-book interface for scaffolding thinking context to learn from writing examples

Effective reading strategies, including using graphic organizers, question answering, and considering story structures, can help students improve reading comprehension. However, these reading strategies are not fully supported by both printed books and e-books. Students who master these reading strategies can learn effectively. By contrast, students without effective reading strategies cannot grasp thinking contexts, which leads to unfavorable learning outcomes. This paper presents a novel e-book interface that features thinking maps and a question answering mechanism on the same page. The thinking maps and question answering mechanism can stimulate students to reflect on reading content, which in this study was college entrance exam compositions, and help students to more effectively understand the context of their reading content. After we developed our reading system, 61 participants were recruited for system evaluation. The results indicate that students in the treatment group acquired significantly more vocabulary and understood the story structure more competently than did students in the control group. Treatment group participants expressed that they were satisfied with the thinking maps and question answering mechanism.