Ebook presentation styles and their impact on the learning of children

As technology advances, more and more learning materials can be expected to be available as ebooks. In spite of this, there is limited understanding as to how their content should be presented to enhance learning. In this experiment, 11-year-old children interacted with an ebook that contained either representational pictures, decorative pictures, seductive pictures or no pictures at all. They then took part in both a retention and transfer test. The results of these tests showed that the children attained their highest scores in both tests with the ebook that contained representational pictures and that they benefitted from the decorative style more than text only in retention test. The findings of this experiment should be of value to people involved in the design of children's ebooks and those who work on multimedia instructional materials.