children's books research paper

REVIEW article

The role of book features in young children's transfer of information from picture books to real-world contexts.

• 1 Counselling and Psychology in Education, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, United States
• 2 Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

Picture books are an important source of new language, concepts, and lessons for young children. A large body of research has documented the nature of parent-child interactions during shared book reading. A new body of research has begun to investigate the features of picture books that support children's learning and transfer of that information to the real world. In this paper, we discuss how children's symbolic development, analogical reasoning, and reasoning about fantasy may constrain their ability to take away content information from picture books. We then review the nascent body of findings that has focused on the impact of picture book features on children's learning and transfer of words and letters, science concepts, problem solutions, and morals from picture books. In each domain of learning we discuss how children's development may interact with book features to impact their learning. We conclude that children's ability to learn and transfer content from picture books can be disrupted by some book features and research should directly examine the interaction between children's developing abilities and book characteristics on children's learning.

On the bookshelf of a pre-reader, one may find storybooks that take children to magical worlds with fantastical characters, to faraway lands with unique animals and customs, or keep them close to home with tales about backyard bullies or trips to the dentist. Alongside these, one may also find factual books about outer space, underwater creatures, or pre-historic dinosaurs. These books may differ from one another in a number of their features, including their genre, presence of fantastical elements, pictorial realism, and use of factual language. Children are expected to learn facts, concepts, or values and apply them to real life. The current body of evidence on whether children can learn and transfer new content from picture books suggests that it is important to consider both the dimensions on which the books vary and children's developing abilities. In this review we summarize the existing evidence on the effect of book features on young children's learning and transfer and outline three developmental abilities that may interact with whether children's learning will be impacted by the presence or absence of those book features.

The majority of past research on picture books has focused on the nature of the book sharing interaction between adults and children (e.g., Fletcher and Reese, 2005 ). This large body of research demonstrates that different picture book features shape the interactions that take place between dyads; for example expository texts lead to more maternal teaching during reading than narrative texts ( Pellegrini et al., 1990 ), less specific language ( Nyhout and O'Neill, 2014 ), and more maternal feedback ( Moschovaki and Meadows, 2005 ), whereas high quality illustrations lead to more child labeling of pictures ( Potter and Haynes, 2000 ). Mothers are more likely to point and label letters for their young children when interacting with a plain book than a book with manipulative features and children also vocalize most often about the letters and pictures in the plain book ( Chiong and DeLoache, 2012 ). Thus, aspects of the book can alter what both parents and children focus on. Recently the impact of book features directly on children's learning from print picture books has also received increasing attention in developmental research. Two recent reviews have provided targeted overviews of features that support vocabulary learning ( Wasik et al., 2016 ) and learning from fictional media more broadly ( Hopkins and Weisberg, 2017 ). These reviews indicate that children are selective in their learning and that properties of media can affect children's learning. In the current review, we focus specifically on learning from picture books, with the goal of outlining how three key developmental factors (symbolic development, analogical reasoning, and reasoning about fantasy) may influence young children's learning and transfer from books that vary across various dimensions. We will focus on domains of learning where most of the research on picture book features so far has been conducted with pre-readers: learning of words and letters, science concepts, problem solutions, and morals.

One goal of educational book-sharing interactions is for children to build generalizable knowledge they can learn and transfer outside of storybooks to everyday situations. By learning , we refer to the child's ability to recognize or recite information presented in a book. By transfer , we refer to an ability that goes beyond such learning: the ability to apply newly-acquired information to new exemplars or contexts. By picture books , we refer to books designed for pre-readers that contain pictures and may also contain text. We first present three developmental factors that may constrain learning and transfer from picture books. They have been selected because of their importance in supporting transfer of information across contexts, which is the focus of the studies we review here. We then provide a summary of studies investigating how features of picture books influence children's learning and transfer across a variety of educational domains by either reinforcing or working against the developmental processes presented. We conclude with ideas for new research and ways in which parents and educators can scaffold children's learning and transfer from picture books.

Developmental Factors Influencing Children's Learning from Picture Books

Children's ability to transfer knowledge from picture books to the real world may be constrained by developments in their symbolic understanding, analogical reasoning, and their understanding of fantasy and reality. Although we discuss them separately, these areas of development are interwoven. As we will see, these developmental factors can be used to explain experimental findings on children's learning and transfer from picture books, as well as identify areas for future research.

Symbolic Development

One particular challenge that children may face when learning and applying real-world information from picture books is that of symbolic insight ( DeLoache, 1991 ). That is, children need to be able to think flexibly about books as entities in themselves as well as symbolic sources of information about the world. For example, when reading an informational book about new animals such as South American cavies, children need to realize that they are reading a book with pages that can be flipped and pictures that tell a story about 2-dimensional cavies. They also need to recognize that the cavies on the page are intended to be representative of animals in the real world that have the same name (“cavies”) and features. Understanding that a picture in a book is an object that represents another entity is a symbolic task. This may not be a straightforward task for children especially since pictures in children's book can vary on the nature of their relation to the referent, that is, whether the picture represents real concrete (e.g., a cat) and abstract (e.g., letters and numbers) entities or imaginary entities (e.g., talking cats, talking pots, unicorns; Ganea and Canfield, 2015 ). Beyond the basic understanding that pictures are symbolic and stand for their referents, children will have to figure out what the nature of the referent is.

Young children often struggle with tasks that require symbolic reasoning. For example, 2-year-olds struggle to use information from videos and pictures of a room to help them find an object hidden in the real version of the room ( Troseth and DeLoache, 1998 ). Despite the fact that these toddlers can easily point out and label the corresponding objects in the pictures and in the room, they do not transfer information from one to the other. Presumably this is because they think of the picture and the room each as a separate entity, and do not make the connection that the hidden object in the picture also represents a life-sized object hiding behind a pillow in the life-sized room. In addition, pictures in books are “impoverished” compared to information presented in real life because they provide only one visual perspective, lack depth cues like motion parallax and changing shadows, and may be low resolution. Simcock and DeLoache (2006) assert that perceptual differences between images in picture books and objects in the real world present a barrier to children's ability to use picture books symbolically, as a source of information about the world. This problem is not specific to young children's use of information from picture books, but from other symbolic media as well, such as videos ( Anderson and Pempek, 2005 ; Barr, 2013 ). There is some evidence that transfer difficulties are similar across different media (books vs. videos; Brito et al., 2012 ), although there is also evidence of medium-specific differences in transfer (books vs. touchscreens; Strouse and Ganea, 2017 ). For the remainder of this review we will focus specifically on factors influencing young children's transfer from picture books.

Various features of picture books may differentially affect children's ability to treat the information symbolically. For example, pictures that more clearly represent the objects they depict may support children in recognizing the link between book depictions and the real world ( Ganea et al., 2008 ; Ganea and Canfield, 2015 ). As such, unrealistic portrayals such as cartoonish images, fantastical settings, and depictions of animals with human characteristics may present particular challenges for children and will be reviewed below. Tactile features may pose a similar challenge, as they may highlight the book as an object, rather than as a symbol with information to be conveyed about the real world. These interactions between symbolic understanding and book features will be reviewed across various domains of learning below.

Analogical Reasoning

For successful transfer of complex information and concepts, children may need more than symbolic insight. To transfer basic information like the name of a novel animal from a picture book, children need to activate a representation of the animal in the book and remember details about its appearance to correctly apply the label to the real-world animal. To transfer more complex concepts, such as the ability for animals (in general) to use color camouflage to hide from predators, children must also recognize the abstract features of the depicted example and apply these to novel instances. Transferring conceptual information from one domain to another—in this case, from the picture book to the real world—requires children to recognize the abstract relational structure between the two domains ( Gentner, 1989 ).

Children's ability to reason analogically depends somewhat on the difficulty of the task and their existing knowledge of the relations used in the analogy ( Goswami, 1991 ). When they have experience in a domain, children as young as 1 or 2 years can use deep rather than surface features to solve analogical problems (e.g., Brown, 1990 ; Chen et al., 1997 ). However, when domain knowledge is limited, children without prior conceptual knowledge may be reliant on surface-level features to help them look for commonalities across analogical cases ( Brown, 1989 ). One benefit of picture books as an educational resource is that they can provide children access to content that they would not experience in their day-to-day lives. However, this very feature of picture books may make analogical transfer especially difficult. For example, if children's understanding of color camouflage is tied to specific picture book illustrations (e.g., a frog) and surface features of that example (e.g., greenishness), they will likely fail to transfer the concept to other animals or contexts.

As with symbolic reasoning, various features of picture books may differentially affect children's ability to analogically transfer conceptual information in books. For example, given that perceptual similarity between transfer contexts facilitates analogical reasoning ( Crisafi and Brown, 1986 ; Brown, 1989 ), children's transfer of new content from books with fantastical contexts and characters should be more impacted than transfer from books with realistic contexts and characters ( Richert et al., 2009 ). If we expect children to learn and transfer novel content from picture books to a real-world context, stories that are more similar in surface structure to the real world would be easier for children to use a source of information about the world. Interactions between book features and analogical reasoning will be reviewed below.

Reasoning about Fantasy and Reality

Children also have the challenge of determining which information in picture books should even be transferred. Anthropomorphism, or animals with attributes characteristic of humans, may be especially confusing when some information is meant to generalize and other information is meant to be true only in the story world. For example, if the cavies in a story talk and wear clothes, children must separate this anthropomorphization of cavies from factual information, inhibit transferring the unrealistic attributes, and selectively transfer only the factual information presented. Children's learning from picture books must be selective in that they have to separate what information is fictional versus what could be true in reality, which is generally referred to as the “reader's dilemma” ( Potts et al., 1989 ; Gerrig and Prentice, 1991 ).

The process of keeping real-world knowledge separate from fictional or false information encountered in a story context may be especially difficult in early childhood because children between the ages of 3 and 8 are just beginning to differentiate fantasy and reality ( Woolley and Cox, 2007 ). According to Woolley and Ghossainy (2013) young children are “naïve skeptics” when it comes to judging the reality status of fictional information. Instead of over-incorporating fantastical information into their real-world concepts, children err on the side of rejecting factual information presented. For example, 4- to 8-year-olds were more likely to state that an improbable event is impossible than to accept an impossible event as possible ( Shtulman and Carey, 2007 ). A bias toward skepticism may impede transfer of educational information, as children may tend to not transfer details they are uncertain are “real.”

The ability to accurately distinguish reality and fantasy may also be related to children's representational development. Corriveau and Harris (2015) found that 3- to 4-year-olds accurately distinguished historical and fantastical characters in narratives at the same time that they started passing false belief and false signs tasks, suggesting that an understanding of representation (both mental and symbolic) may underlie the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Picture books, both in terms of their prose and illustrations, may be designed to represent reality or to represent make-believe. Corriveau and Harris (2015) argue that children may have difficulty deciding which of the two functions a particular story may fulfill. Thus, children's ability to separate fantasy from reality may depend both on their recognition that a story stands for something and their ability to judge what that something is (reality or pretend). In addition, children's own experiences and background knowledge may influence the aspects of stories they view as realistic versus fantastical ( Corriveau et al., 2015 ).

Books with unrealistic content, such as impossible events or anthropomorphic depictions of animals, may present a challenge to children in separating which aspects of the book apply to the real world and which belong only in the book. Therefore, we again expect books with realistic content to be more supportive of learning transfer, especially when learning conceptual information such as scientific facts and concepts. Although these book features interact with the two other developmental factors discussed above—symbolic development and analogical reasoning—we also expect the developing ability to reason about what is real and what is fantastical to constrain or enable learning and transfer.

The following sections provide a review of how particular aspects of picture books (such as genre, pictorial realism, and the presence of manipulative features) interact with the three developmental factors we have proposed to influence children's transfer from picture books. We chose not to present this review as systematic or definitive, as research in many areas is in its early stages (see Table 1 ). Rather, we present information about how our identified developmental factors inform our understanding about children's learning from various book features and areas for further consideration in picture book research. We focus predominately on pre-readers who are listening to an adult read while they view the book's pictures.

Table 1 . Summary of book features' impact on learning and transfer in each learning domain.

Domains of Learning

Particular features of picture books, such as the specific content they incorporate, or the way in which the content is presented, may influence children's tendency to learn and transfer the educational content to real-world situations. Below we review studies that investigate some of these features, organized by the domain in which the educational content is presented. We have chosen this organization because particular features may be more influential in some learning domains than others. For example, visual features may be important when learning vocabulary, where children may be fairly successful at transfer on the basis of matching up perceptual features of objects. However, contextual information may be more important in science domains where transfer often takes place on a conceptual level. The domains we have chosen are primarily the domains in which the impact of picture book features on transfer of information presented in books have been studied. In each section, we address the book features that have been studied in that domain, interpreted with regard to our three developmental factors. Future work is needed to address how book features influence transfer in other domains such as math and the arts, as well as how additional book features impact transfer.

Word and Letter Learning

Picture books expose children to rich language. For example, picture books contain a richer diversity of words ( Montag et al., 2015 ) and a greater incidence of rare grammatical constructions ( Cameron-Faulkner and Noble, 2013 ) than child-directed speech. In addition, caregivers use a larger number and wider variety of words during reading than other activities ( Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991 ). It is not surprising, then, that joint reading has been associated with a variety of later language outcomes, including vocabulary growth and early literacy skills like letter knowledge (e.g., Bus et al., 1995 ). Here we are interested in particular features of books that may support the process of language learning from picture books on a less protracted scale—words and letters learned from individual reading sessions. We expect that symbolic understanding plays an especially important role in this domain, as transfer of a new word to a new context heavily depends on recognition of the labeled item in the book as representing objects in the real world to which the label also applies ( Preissler and Carey, 2004 ; Ganea et al., 2008 , 2009 ). Thus, features of books that make the link between depicted objects and real world referents clearer or easier to discern should support transfer, whereas features of books that make these links more difficult to recognize may make transfer more difficult. The book features that have been most studied in this domain include pictorial realism, manipulative features, and fantastical contexts.

Pictorial Realism

Picture books vary in the degree to which their pictures represent reality, from photographs to illustrations to cartoonish line drawings. An image that is highly iconic, or visually very similar to its referent, may highlight the relation between the picture book image and real-world instances. As such, we might predict photographs to be the most supportive of children's transfer of knowledge from books to reality.

Newborn infants perceive and distinguish the dimensional nature of pictures from real objects. If presented with a complex object and a photograph of it, they clearly prefer the real object ( Slater et al., 1984 ). However, when presented with photographs alone, 9-month-olds interact with them in ways similar to how they would interact with the real object they represent—by hitting, rubbing, and grasping the photographs ( Pierroutsakos and DeLoache, 2003 ). Their behavior suggests they have not yet grasped the symbolic function of pictures.

As infants reach the middle of their second year, they begin to treat pictures referentially, by pointing and labeling the depicted objects ( DeLoache et al., 1998 ). Research also indicates that in their second year of life children understand the representational status of pictures ( Preissler and Carey, 2004 ; Ganea et al., 2009 ). Yet, children's transfer of novel words from picture books to the real world referent can be impacted by pictorial realism at these ages. Ganea et al. (2008) showed 15- and 18-month-olds picture books presenting both familiar and novel objects in the form of photographs, realistic color drawings that closely resembled the photographs, or color cartoons which were less detailed and more distorted in appearance. After being read the book by a researcher (told the names for the pictured objects), children of both ages were able to recognize the labeled object they had seen in the book regardless of the type of image. However, children who were read the cartoon book did not generalize to a picture of a new exemplar different in color. Eighteen-month-olds transferred the label to its physical real-word referent across all three conditions, but 15-month-olds did so only in the photograph and drawing conditions. Taken together, these findings suggest that transfer from the photographs was easiest for children, and transfer from cartoons the most difficult. With age, children get better at transferring from perceptually dissimilar depictions to real objects, although there is evidence that the iconicity of pictures continues to play a role in some picture transfer tasks even at 3 years of age ( Callaghan, 2000 ; Mareovich and Peralta, 2015 ). The impact of iconicity on young children's learning from picture books has also been found with other measures, such as imitation ( Simcock and DeLoache, 2006 ). Thus, at young ages, when children are first beginning to think symbolically, their understanding that pictures stand for real objects interacts with the type of depictions in books.

Manipulative Features

The term “manipulative features” has been used to refer to features that are “designed to increase children's physical interaction with [a] book,” like lift-a-flap, scratch-and-sniff, and other three-dimensional add-ons ( Tare et al., 2010 , p. 396). These features may be entertaining for children, but research suggests they may not be optimal for learning. One reason they may not be optimal for learning is that they may draw attention away from links between the book and the real world. For young children who are still learning to use pictures in books as “standing for” real objects, this may distract from the insight necessary for transfer of learned information.

Using books designed to teach children animal names, Tare et al. (2010) tested the helping or hindering influence of manipulative features on 18- to 22-month-olds' learning and transfer of the animal names. Children were read a book by a researcher featuring 9 animals either using a commercially presented manipulative book (with flaps and pull tabs) or a scanned copy of the book (without manipulative features). At test, children who had seen a copy of the book without manipulatives correctly generalized a new animal name to new pictures and a replica of the animal. Children who read the book with manipulative features did not perform above chance. In another study, researchers compared 30- to 36-month-olds' learning of letters from a manipulative alphabet book with pulls, flaps and textures to a book without these features ( Chiong and DeLoache, 2012 ). Children learned more letters from the simple alphabet book than the manipulative one. The authors argued that the salience of manipulative features may render them more like objects themselves and less like symbols that stand for other objects than their 2D counterparts. Children's difficulty transferring labels from manipulative books may therefore stem from a difficulty in “seeing past” the fancy features to realize that the content is representational, meaningful, and applicable to other contexts.

Another possibility is that children's mental effort is engaged with interaction with the features rather than attending to the content. For example, pulling a tab in an alphabet book to make a truck move does not help to emphasize the correspondence between the letter T and the first sound in the word “truck.” There is other evidence that features that require additional mental effort, like having multiple large pictures on each page, can result in cognitive overload, disrupting learning ( Flack and Horst, 2017 ). Flack and Horst (2017) read 3- to 5-year-olds books with one or two regular-sized illustrations per page spread or one large image per spread. New objects in the pictures were labeled with new words during reading. At test, children were asked to identify the referent of the labels by pointing to the correct objects on a book page. Children were more successful when they had seen one illustration, regardless of size, indicating that two illustrations may have resulted in cognitive overload. The researchers did not assess transfer of learning. In a follow-up study, a hand gesture that directed children to the correct illustration supported learning from the book with two pictures per spread. In light of these effects of cognitive overload on children's learning, more research is needed to determine whether manipulatives are particularly disruptive of symbolic insight, whether they result in cognitive overload, or both.

Research shows that not all manipulative features are detrimental to children's learning. Multimedia researchers have argued that extra book features that engage children with the educational content of books (called “considerate,” Labbo and Kuhn, 2000 ) can support learning. A recent meta-analysis of studies involving electronic books with considerate enhancements like animated pictures, music, and sound effects were supportive of vocabulary learning for preschool and elementary children ( Takacs et al., 2015 ). While we know of no similar results with manipulative features of print books, one study suggests that manipulatives designed to draw attention to the educational content, in this case the shape of letters, did not distract 3-year-olds from learning the letter names ( Chiong and DeLoache, 2012 ).

For both word and letter learning, the manipulative features traditionally found in print books do not appear to facilitate learning and transfer, and in cases when the features are irrelevant to the book's educational content, may even interfere with it. Content-central manipulatives that highlight educational content, such as highlighting the visual shape of a letter—the crucial component for transferring the letter name to new instances of the letter—may hold promise in facilitating symbolic insight, and thus transfer. Research in this area will become especially crucial as the features available in digital books continue to expand.

Fantastical Contexts

In picture books both fantastical and realistic, children may encounter new and unusual vocabulary. However, we might predict that realistic story contexts provide more cues to children that they can use to match story depictions and contexts with real-world situations. The similarity between the learning and transfer contexts can provide support for symbolic insight—recognizing the similarity between a symbol and its referent—as well as for analogical transfer. A recent intervention with low-income preschoolers investigated the effect of fantastical or realistic content on children's word learning ( Weisberg et al., 2015 ). Children were presented with a set of realistic or fantastical commercial picture books and toys. The researchers measured children's comprehension of the vocabulary presented in the books and toys receptively and asked them to tell everything they knew about the tested word (e.g., “What are weeds?”). Across both conditions, children showed similar gains in identifying the tested objects. However, children in the fantastical condition were able to provide more information about the objects when given open-ended prompts. This study suggests that children learned more about the target objects in the fantastical contexts. Importantly, however, this study did not assess any type of transfer to the real world, and no distinction was made between fantastical and realistic information in explanations given by children. How fantasy may influence children's ability to transfer labels to new exemplars or real-world referents remains to be investigated. Consideration of the developmental factors we identified here—symbolic insight, analogical transfer, and reasoning about fantasy and reality—would lead one to predict that children will have more difficulty transferring labels from fantastical than realistic books to real-world referents.

Summary: Picture Books and Word and Letter Learning

Picture books are a rich source of new language. Because infants and toddlers are just learning to use pictures symbolically to refer to other objects, features that support this insight rather than distract from it are most supportive. If the goal is to teach children new words or letters, it appears that books with realistic images are best, especially with the youngest children. If books with manipulative features are selected, they should draw attention to the educational content rather than distract from it. More research is needed to determine the influence of realistic versus fantastical contexts on children's transfer of new words they have learned to other contexts, as well as how these contexts interact with children's developing abilities to distinguish fantasy and reality. Future research could consider not only the variety of picture arrangements on a page ( Flack and Horst, 2017 ) but also the type of backgrounds that pictures are displayed on and the type of object arrangements (whether an object is displayed with objects from the same category or a different category). An insightful analysis of the structure of children's books for children aged 0 and 3 was provided by Kummerling-Meibauer and Meibauer (2011) and future research could use it as a guideline to experimentally test what types of book structures are most inducive to young children's word and letter learning.

Learning Biological Facts and Concepts

Children's learning about non-human animals has been the focus of most studies of children's biology learning from picture books. Children are naturally interested in animals from a young age ( DeLoache et al., 2011 ) and animals feature heavily in books designed for young children ( Marriott, 2002 ). Thus, this domain for learning involves the largest amount of research on the impact of picture book features on transfer. A subset of studies has investigated biological concepts that apply to humans and non-human animals alike, including nutrition ( Gripshover and Markman, 2013 ) and adaptation by natural selection ( Kelemen et al., 2014 ). Another, reviewed here, focused on teaching children a novel biological causal relationship ( Walker et al., 2014 ).

As is the case when learning the correspondence between words and letters and their referents, symbolic understanding can also play an important role in learning and transfer of biological facts and concepts. However, transfer of conceptual knowledge requires more than just symbolically matching a picture with its real-world referent; it often involves more complex reasoning about similarities between situations and selection of the correct details for transfer. Therefore analogical reasoning and discrimination between fantasy and reality should play a much more central role in young children's learning of biological information from picture books than it did for word and letter learning. The book features that have been studied in this domain include manipulative features, fantastical contexts, anthropomorphism, and genre.

Concerns about the use of manipulative features in biology learning mirror those for word learning. When children are learning to symbolically link picture books and the real world, distracting features in books may disrupt that link. In one study with 27- to 39-month-olds, children were read either a pop-up book, a book with realistic images, or a book with drawings ( Tare et al., 2010 , Study 2). During book sharing, the experimenter told the child four facts about the dietary preferences of animals depicted in the books (e.g., chicks like to eat worms). Children who were read the pop-up book learned fewer facts from the book than children who were read the books without pop-up features. This study did not assess transfer of those facts to new contexts, but demonstrates that features that distract from or obscure the basic correspondence between pictures and their referent operate to decrease learning in the biological domain, as with word and letter learning.

Although fantasy may be a much-loved and engaging genre, what do the violations of reality inherent to this genre mean for children's learning and transfer? Fantastical books may vary widely by mixing characters, settings, and events that vary in their realistic nature. Books with fantastical aspects could be an especially good choice for young children because they may engage children in imaginative thinking. Imaginative play may facilitate better causal reasoning ( Walker and Gopnik, 2013 ), better deductive reasoning ( Dias and Harris, 1988 ), and increased empathy for and understanding of others ( Mar and Oatley, 2008 ). Parker and Lepper (1992) suggest that fantasy contexts may also be highly educational because they are engaging and motivating for children (see also Hopkins and Weisberg, 2017 ). However, fantastical contexts may make it more difficult for children to see links between books and reality, whether symbolically or analogically. Fantastical contexts may also make it more difficult for children to identify what information in books is real and should be transferred.

In a study of children's causal learning from realistic versus fantastical picture books, Walker et al. (2014) presented 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds with one of two fictional picture books and tested their generalization of a fictional target biological causal relation: Popple Flowers cause hiccups when one sniffs them. The target relation was couched in either a realistic world (e.g., a boy climbs a tree) or a fantastical world (e.g., a boy has a conversation with a tree). In both books, the boy sniffs a popple flower and gets hiccups. Children were then asked to judge whether events in the story “could really happen” or “cannot really happen, and are just pretend.” Next, children were told by the experimenter that she smelled a Popple Flower earlier and asked whether they thought she did or did not get hiccups. When the fictional story world was more realistic, children were more likely to judge the target relation as something that “could really happen” and to predict that the experimenter got hiccups from smelling the flower herself. The tendency to transfer the target information from the more fantastical world decreased with age, as children's ability to distinguish fantasy and reality matured. This study indicates that when children are asked to transfer information from the story to a supposed real-world situation (a real person sniffing a Popple Flower) they rely on contextual information presented in the story to reason about whether the information should be transferred or not. In the case of the fantastical story, the context of the story world and the real world were less similar than in the case of the realistic story, thus decreasing the chance of analogical transfer. Also, as noted before, when children are uncertain about the fantastical status of information, they tend to be skeptical, erring on the side of caution when determining what is real. Fantastical contexts may cue children that information in the story is irrelevant to their situation and thus decrease their tendency to apply the information to realistic contexts.

Anthropomorphism

In an analysis of 1,064 modern picture books, Marriott (2002) concluded that picture books typically present the animal kingdom and its natural environment in an inaccurate and misleading manner, including a tendency toward anthropomorphism. Providing animals with habitats and traits that are realistic for humans may be an especially difficult type of fantasy for children to recognize, as these features may fit comfortably with their own personal experiences of the world. For example, it may seem plausible that animals would cry when sad or sleep with a blanket because those are part of children's everyday lives. Recent evidence demonstrates that children may struggle to distinguish between the anthropomorphic characteristics portrayed in stories and the real characteristics of animals. This struggle could influence the information that children transfer from stories to the real world.

In one study, Ganea et al. (2014) created two types of picture books about novel animals: one with factual language and another with anthropomorphic language. Both book types contained realistic images, and provided facts about each target animal. Across both book types, 3- to 5-year-olds who were read the books by a researcher learned the target facts presented in the picture books. Importantly, however, children who heard anthropomorphic stories about novel animals more often attributed anthropomorphic characteristics (e.g., feeling proud, having friends) to real animals in photographs than did those who heard the stories with no anthropomorphic language. Thus, children sometimes incorrectly transferred anthropomorphic attributes to real animals.

In a second study, Ganea et al. (2014) investigated the impact of anthropomorphic images on children's fact learning and tendency to anthropomorphize. They presented a new group of 3- and 5-year-old children with books about novel animals that contained either factual or anthropomorphic language. In this case, both book types included anthropomorphic illustrations (e.g., animals eating at a dinner table). Children in the full anthropomorphic condition (anthropomorphic images + language) answered fewer factual questions correctly than children in the anthropomorphic images only condition (with factual language). Children in the full anthropomorphic condition also attributed more anthropomorphic characteristics to real animals. These findings suggest anthropomorphic language may be particularly confusing for children.

Using storybooks with subtler forms of anthropomorphism, Geerdts et al. (2015) investigated the effects of anthropomorphism on 3- to 6-year-old children's learning about camouflage. In their anthropomorphic books, animals were portrayed with human-like faces and postures, but in their natural environment. Children read a picture book with either factual or anthropomorphized language, combined with either realistic or these subtler anthropomorphic pictures. In general, transfer was low—only a group of boys exposed to the book with the anthropomorphic pictures transferred information about camouflage to realistic situations at test, and there were no condition differences in the psychological properties children attributed to animals. The study had only 12 children per condition, so limited conclusions can be drawn about the lack of condition effects. Future research will need to address whether the style of anthropomorphic depictions has an impact on what children learn and transfer from stories.

Another recent study offers insights into how anthropomorphic depictions influence children's biological reasoning and learning. Waxman et al. (2014) told 5-year-olds a novel fact either about dogs or about humans (i.e., “Dogs/Humans have andro inside them.”). They then read children a few pages from an anthropomorphic book (Berenstain Bears) or a realistic book (an animal encyclopedia entry). After the realistic book children reasoned that bears had andro regardless of whether they had been told the fact about humans or dogs. After the anthropomorphic book, children reasoned that bears had andro only if they had been told the fact about humans. This study suggests that anthropomorphic portrayals may lead children to think of those animals as more human-like, and even a very brief exposure to depictions of animals in picture books (whether anthropomorphic or realistic) can influence the way they reason about non-human animals as having human traits.

Children's anthropocentric biases may also interact with the format of the books in which they encounter novel animals. We know that children from rural communities, who likely had more experience with nature, are less like to take an anthropocentric perspective than urban children ( Waxman and Medin, 2007 ), perhaps because they have more first-hand experience that allows them to accurately identify anthropomorphic portrayals as fantastical. On the other hand, urban children who lack first-hand experience with a variety of animals may instead have anthropomorphic reasoning reinforced through other sources, such as media depictions (e.g., picture books) and conversations ( Herrmann et al., 2010 ). These different anthropocentric biases may affect the extent to which children transfer information they encounter in a fantastical book about animals, with rural children less likely to transfer anthropomorphic information and urban children more so. Anthropomorphic depictions of animals in picture books may in turn increase children's tendency to consider animals as human-like, especially for children who have limited first-hand experience with other species. As researchers work to follow up the potentially positive roles that anthropomorphic characters may play, parents and teachers can work to dispel biological misconceptions by talking with their children about which characteristics are real and which are not ( McCrindle and Odendaal, 1994 ; Marriott, 2002 ; Gebhard et al., 2003 ). Thus, supporting children's fantasy-reality distinction through discussion can support children who have not fully developed this ability to appropriately learn and apply information from books to the real world.

Children may also use book genre as a cue to determine whether information should be transferred to new contexts or is applicable only to story worlds. Children's books can be divided broadly into fiction (generally narratives) and non-fiction (informational, generally non-narrative) genres. Informational texts are realistic non-fiction books that are designed to convey information about the natural and social worlds ( Duke, 2000 ). Informational books play an important role in classrooms; imagine learning organic chemistry or algebra without a textbook! Despite their prevalence in advanced classrooms, informational texts are rare in early childhood and early elementary classrooms ( Pressley et al., 1996 ; Duke, 2000 ). Although sales in the informational book genre have grown in recent years, sales for children's fiction remain approximately four times higher ( Milliot, 2015 ). The traditional absence of information books from early childhood contexts may be the result of a widely held assumption that narrative is the more effective genre for engaging children ( Donovan and Smolkin, 2001 ; Duke et al., 2003 ; Mantzicopoulos and Patrick, 2011 ). However, a recent study found that preschoolers actually preferred information books over fictional ones, and teachers found the content more transferrable to real life ( Kotaman and Tekin, 2017 ).

One hallmark of informational books is that they contain more generic language than narrative books ( Gelman et al., 2012 ). Laboratory studies have shown that 3- and 4-year-olds are sensitive to differences in language and extend properties to larger categories when they hear generic language ( Cimpian and Markman, 2008 ). Due to the differences in style of language used by the books, we might expect children to more readily transfer information from informational books. For example, a narrative book about cavies might contain the statement, “Dave the cavie eats fruit,” whereas an informational book might state, “Cavies eat fruit.” Based on Cimpian and Markman's (2008) findings we might predict that the generic nature of the second statement could act as a cue that all cavies eat fruit, rather than the specific cavie named Dave. However, it may be the case that children's generalization is robust to differences in genre and language specificity when the type of content applies at the category level (e.g., about diet). When mothers share picture books with children they provide both generic and specific language when offering natural facts about animals, suggesting generalizable facts are not consistently in generic language ( Nyhout and O'Neill, 2014 ).

No studies have addressed learning biological information from non-narrative information versus narrative fiction specifically; however, one study compared two books where some of the language differed in specificity. Three- and four-year-olds were read one of two narrative picture books designed to teach the concept of color camouflage ( Ganea et al., 2011 ). The factual book contained a combination of general statements about frogs interspersed with a narrative about a specific bird and frog called “the bird” and “the frog.” In the intentional book, the frog was named “Sammy” and generic statements about frogs were replaced with specific statements about Sammy. The intentional book also included statements anthropomorphizing the intentions of the animals, e.g., “Sammy tricked the bird.” Three- and four-year-olds successfully transferred information about camouflage to novel situations presented using photos of frogs and other animals regardless of which book they read. Four-year-olds also transferred to live animals in tanks. The study shows that children can transfer biological information from books to the real world when both types of language are used. Further research will be needed to establish whether generic language used in books provides a cue to children about transfer, as one may expect from other research, and whether other genre-related book features influence children's learning.

Summary: Picture Books and Biology Learning

Differences in book features appear to have significant effects on children's ability to extract and transfer biological information to the real world. Fantastical contexts used in stories may cue children that information presented in books is not transferrable to real-world contexts. Because children tend to err on the side of caution when reasoning about what events could really happen, children may fail to apply accurate biological information presented in fantastical stories, dismissing it as unrealistic. In contrast, anthropomorphic details in stories appear to push children's reasoning in the opposite direction—influencing children to reason about animals as similar to humans and potentially motivating them to accept inaccurate biological information about animals. This may be mediated by experience; children without extensive experience with animals may use their own personal (human) experience to help them distinguish what is realistic. Adults may help to dispel misconceptions about animals by talking with children about the characteristics portrayed in stories. In either case, realistic books may more readily support analogical transfer by portraying contexts similar to the real world and characteristics that are appropriate for transfer.

Finally, book genre has the potential to support transfer via its use of stylistic features such as language and image type. More research is needed to determine the extent to which the specificity of language used or other genre-related features support children's acquisition of biological information from picture books. Contexts that more clearly resemble reality may support both the symbolic insight needed for learning in transfer in children's early acquisition of biological facts from books (e.g., chicks eat worms) and the analogical reasoning needed for later acquisition of scientific concepts (e.g., camouflage).

The task of learning physics concepts is similar to that of learning biological concepts in many ways. First, information may require conceptual abstraction beyond lining up surface features—e.g., both natural selection and centrifugal force apply in situations that vary greatly in context. Thus, picture book features that are based on visual similarity (like pictorial realism) may be less important for supporting transfer than features that support insight into analogical contexts. However, the necessary mismatches between the fantastical details in stories and real-world contexts may make it more difficult for children to recognize similarities between the contexts, thus disrupting analogical transfer. Second, realistic and unrealistic information about both biology and physics is often mixed together in children's stories, making fantasy-reality distinctions particularly difficult. For example, in The Magic School Bus and the Electric Field Trip , children are taught about electricity through a narrative in which the school bus shrinks to the size of an electron—violating certain laws of physics while intending to teach others. The necessary mismatches between the fantastical details in stories and real-world contexts may make it more difficult for children to recognize similarities between the contexts, thus disrupting analogical transfer. Despite their similarities, however, there is reason to expect that children will treat information about biology and physics differently. Sobel and Weisberg (2014) found that 4-year-olds who constructed a story were more likely to include events involving physical violations (e.g., walking through a wall) than biological ones (e.g., aging backwards), indicating that children found reality-violating physical events and contexts more acceptable than reality-violating biological events in their stories.

Two very recent studies indicate that books appear to be good tools for teaching children transferrable concepts about physics. Ganea et al. (2017) found that 6- and 7-year-olds with misconceptions about balance showed improved understanding of balance on a real-world task regardless of whether they were read a realistic or fantastical book about balancing a see-saw. The majority of children maintained this improvement at a follow-up visit after a 1-week delay. In another study, 4- and 5-year-olds learned and transferred information about gravity and falling objects equally well from an informational or narrative picture book read to them by a researcher ( Venkadasalam and Ganea, 2017 ). From the sparse evidence available, transfer of physical science concepts does not appear to be easily disrupted by manipulations of fantastical context or genre as in other domains, although more research, using a broader range of concepts, is needed. In addition, both studies reviewed here involved children learning accurate real-world physical information from books. Future research on fantastical contexts should address whether children are able to discriminate accurate physics information from violations of reality (e.g., shrinking busses) and appropriately apply the real but not the fantastical information to real-world situations.

Problem Solving

Problem solving occurs when one wants to achieve a goal and no obvious solution occurs to the problem-solver ( Mayer and Wittrock, 1996 ). The problem solver accesses their own knowledge and skills to develop a solution. When the problem solved is different from problems encountered previously, this involves a process of transfer. As with all problems of transfer, the problem solver must recognize similarities between what was originally learned and the new context—in this case, similar features of problems. The child must also recognize the solution in the story as a representation of a problem solution that is potentially relevant to events beyond the book context. Symbolic reasoning may help children recognize that information is symbolic and transferrable, and analogical reasoning skills may help children identify potentially relevant contexts for transfer. Thus, we may expect children's skills in these areas to be especially relevant when transferring problem solutions from stories to the real world.

An interesting feature of problem-solution transfer is that is can often occur after a substantial delay. A child may not encounter a relevant real-world problem until days, weeks, or even months after reading the story. The child must recall and recognize the abstract similarities between the story problem and the problem they face that goes beyond the surface features of the two problems. For example, a story character may retrieve a ball stuck in a rafter using a broom. The child may later use a similar strategy to retrieve a ball stuck in a tree using a hockey stick.

As we discuss in more detail below, children's ability to distinguish fantasy and reality may also influence their transfer of problem solutions. Problem solutions present in fantastical stories can be relevant to the real world, and children with a better grasp of possibility may be better able to apply solutions from fantasy to the real world. Children who approach fantastical events with skepticism are unlikely to transfer solutions from these types of stories.

In problem solving tasks that can be solved with some reliance on visual similarity, pictorial realism can impact young children's transfer. Books that incorporate pictures that are more similar to real objects, like photographs, help children align book objects with their real-world referents, and transfer skills they have learned from a book. Simcock and DeLoache (2006) showed 18-, 24-, and 30-month-olds a picture book which portrayed the assembly of a ball, jar, and stick into rattle. After a delay, they were given real versions of the objects and asked tested on whether they assembled the pieces into a rattle. Children at all ages assembled the rattle when they had read a book with color photographs of the objects. Children in the two older age groups transferred the solution from color line drawings, and only children in the oldest group transferred the solution from the book with pencil drawings. This study shows that the pictorial realism of the pictures in the book influenced children's transfer of the rattle assembly, and that this book feature interacts with development. When realistic photos are used, even 13-month-olds can use information presented in a picture book to make inductive inferences about non-obvious properties of real objects and attempt to elicit those properties through particular actions that were depicted in the book ( Keates et al., 2014 ; see also Khu et al., 2014 for a study using the same task).

Simcock and DeLoache's (2006) task required transfer of a solution in which the learning and transfer contexts were highly visually matched. However, as with transfer of scientific concepts, transfer of problem solutions often requires considering deep features rather than surface-level characteristics. This requires skill in analogical reasoning. There are also important differences between transfer of science concepts and problem solutions. In the case of biology and physics, children are tasked with separating realistic from unrealistic information and only transferring that which is applicable to the real world. In the case of biology, this appears to often be difficult for children, as they are not good at distinguishing the two and tend to err on the side of rejecting anything that may seem unrealistic. However, for those who can distinguish appropriately, a lack of realism may act as a useful cue that particular information should not be transferred.

In problem solving, however, the ability to distinguish between realistic and unrealistic information may be less important because solutions to fantastical problems are often applicable to real-world situations if deep features are considered. Even children who can appropriately distinguish fantastical portrayals may struggle to apply problem solutions optimally because their skepticism toward applying fantastical information may lead them to dismiss solutions presented in fantastical contexts even when the problem solution would apply to real-world problems.

In one study, 3- to 6-year-olds were read two “social interaction” stories (joining a friend group and taking another's perspective) and two “physical solution” stories (wrapping and stacking) featuring either human or fantastical characters ( Richert et al., 2009 ). Children more readily transferred solutions to real-world social and physical problems from a story with real characters than one with fantastical characters.

Similarly, Richert and Smith (2011) compared 3- to 5-year-old children's ability to transfer solutions for novel problem types presented in full-length, commercial picture books when read by a researcher. Children were presented with a point-of-view problem, in which the solution was for the character to hide from an individual by standing behind him, and a pulling problem, in which the solution was to attach a suction cup attached to a rope to move an object. Again, children were more likely to transfer the solution to the real world when the problems had been presented in a realistic version of the picture book than a fantastical version.

Similar to the pattern seen in the biological domain, fantastical contexts appear to make transferring problem solutions to real-world situations more difficult for children. In problem solution tasks, children need to identify analogical similarities between a problem presented in a book and a problem faced in the lab. Skill in fantasy-reality discrimination may support children in realizing that problem solutions in fantastical contexts may apply to real world problems. In support of this interpretation, Richert and Schlesinger (2016) found that 3- to 6-year-old children with a better understanding of the fantasy-reality distinction were better able to learn and transfer problem solutions from video stories when fantastical elements were present and relevant to the solution being presented. Fantastical elements that were incidental appeared to distract children and interfere with transfer. More research is needed to identify other features of books that influence children's transfer of problem solving strategies.

Moral Learning

Many popular children's characters have encountered a bully, lied, or had bad dreams. Adults may choose these books hoping they will teach children information they can use in their own daily experiences. However, adults should not assume that pre-readers readily extract the moral messages intended by authors. Even as late as third grade, children have difficulty identifying the moral themes of oral stories when asked to explicitly describe them ( Narvaez et al., 1998 ). These researchers report that children often choose responses that have superficial characteristics in common with the story rather than appropriate thematic responses.

As with science learning and problem solving, children cannot rely on surface-level features to extract moral themes. As such, we might expect analogical reasoning and fantasy-reality distinction to play important roles in learning moral messages. As with problem solving, although morals presented in unrealistic contexts may be applicable to real-world situations, even children with the ability to distinguish fantasy and reality may tend not to transfer moral lessons.

In addition to the challenges discussed in other domains, learning thematic messages from books may be an additionally difficult task because children must learn to connect together the relations and events that occur across multiple story events. According to van den Broek et al. (2005) , this ability emerges at the end of a developmental sequence: first, young children hearing stories begin by making connections between physical events that occur close together in the story. Then, they progress to making connections between more distant and abstract events, followed by clustering events by theme. Once children are able to make these connections, they can use them to extract a story's moral or lesson, an ability requiring analogical reasoning. This developmental sequence unfolds gradually throughout early childhood, possibly making the transfer of moral messages to the real world one of the most difficult domains for learning from picture books. As a result, we might expect transferring morals to be more easily disrupted by book features, but unfortunately, little research is available in this area.

Larsen et al. (2017) tested whether animal characters with human characteristics were better for teaching transferrable morals than human characters using books intended to encourage sharing. Four- to six-year-olds were read either a commercial picture book about an anthropomorphized raccoon who learns that sharing makes her feel good or a version of the book in which the raccoon characters were replaced with humans. Both before and after reading children were given stickers and the opportunity to share some of the stickers with another child who would not have the opportunity to receive any. Children who had read the story with the human characters shared significantly more stickers after than before the book sharing. Those who read the book about anthropomorphized raccoon shared significantly fewer stickers after than before book sharing. Of interest is the finding that children who judged anthropomorphized animals as more human-like (on a categorization task using stimuli unrelated to the main picture books in the study) were those who were most likely to share after hearing the anthropomorphized animal story, suggesting that a lack of identification with the characters could have contributed to lack of transfer of the moral theme. Also, perceived similiarity with the story characters may make it more likely for the child to grasp the intent of the story and apply it to their own lives. Stories are created with the intention to communicate something and to adults the communicative intention behind a story may be straightforward, however children may need more support to be able to identify the story's intended message.

There is additional evidence that human characters may be supportive for helping children identify and extract story themes. Another study, which did not involve a transfer task, found that 4- and 5-year-olds were more likely to identify the theme of a story they were read (ask permission to join a game) if it featured human characters than if they were read the same story with rabbit characters ( Kotaman and Balci, 2017 ). The children who were read the human story also scored better on general story comprehension.

The available research suggests that characters that are, or are perceived as, similar to the child may enhance the extraction of story morals and their transfer to real-world situations. As with other domains, transfer of moral themes depends on children's ability to see the similarity between the situation in books and real-world situations. Realistic characters may be one way of supporting this connection. In addition, characters and contexts that differ greatly from real-world contexts may lead children to question which information in stories is realistic and should be transferred.

Concluding Comments

Adults and children regularly engage in joint reading with a variety of goals. In this review, we have focused on the use of books to teach children transferrable information about words, letters, science, problem solutions, and moral lessons. Through this review, a few important themes have emerged.

First, children's learning from a given picture book appears to be the result of an interaction between the particular features of the book, the type of information to be learned, and constraints on children's development in the areas we have outlined. As we have seen, certain features (e.g., fantasy) may be more disruptive in some domains (i.e., problem solving and moral lessons) than others (i.e., word and physics learning). Children's age and therefore developmental stage also affects what and whether they learn. For example, pictorial realism and manipulative features may be especially disruptive for younger children in word and letter learning where transfer can occur based on aligning surface-level features such as shape and color. In this domain the development of symbolic understanding may help in instances when mismatches between pictures and reality or distacting features interfere with transfer between book and real contexts. This same interaction between book features and development may not be as important in domains like problem solving and morality where children need to understand and transfer deeper features across situations rather than rely on surface-level features. As another example, fantastical contexts may be more detrimental for a child who has not yet worked out how to reliably separate the possible from the impossible because he/she is unlikely to accurately select transferrable information from fantastical stories. However, when children achieve a better grasp of this distinction, fantastical stories may not present as much of a barrier to learning in domains where fantasy serves as a good cue for lack of transferability.

Second, there is still much that we do not know about which features support learning from books. Each feature has been tested only a handful of times in a handful of contexts. While some features, such as realistic portrayals of animals, may be optimal for teaching biology, the reverse may be true for encouraging empathy for animals and nature. For example, children often use anthropomorphic reasoning to explain why trees and other elements of nature should be protected ( Gebhard et al., 2003 ). Different patterns of anthropomorhims effects on children's learning may also emerge at different ages ( Geerdts, 2016 ; Severson and Lemm, 2016 ). Table 1 displays the domains and book features that have been discussed and allows for identification of areas which have not been studied.

Finally, the most supportive thing adults can do to help children learn, even more than selecting high-quality books, is to have conversations with them during reading. Adults reading books with manipulative features, be they traditional or electronic, may support children by focusing less on the hands-on features and drawing attention back to content-related talk. When it comes to choosing information for transfer, adults may use generic language to signal to children that particular information is true across contexts ( Gelman et al., 2012 ). More generally, effective methods for supporting children in transferring conceptual information from one story context to another are to talk with children about the underlying structure of the story ( Brown et al., 1986 ), ask them to teach it to someone else ( Crisafi and Brown, 1986 ), or prompt them to explain ( Walker and Lombrozo, 2017 ). Other dialogic reading techniques such as asking children questions, helping them extract themes, and having them help tell the story across repeated readings may also be supportive of transfer. Parents and teachers may use our review to help select potentially educational books, but reading and talking together can make any book-reading session educational and pleasurable.

Author Contributions

All authors developed the structure and content of the manuscript. GS and AN drafted the manuscript. All authors provided edits and feedback.

This research was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Government of Canada and an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation to PG.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: picture books, symbolic development, analogical reasoning, fantasy distinction, learning, transfer

Citation: Strouse GA, Nyhout A and Ganea PA (2018) The Role of Book Features in Young Children's Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-World Contexts. Front. Psychol . 9:50. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00050

Received: 02 August 2017; Accepted: 12 January 2018; Published: 06 February 2018.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2018 Strouse, Nyhout and Ganea. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Gabrielle A. Strouse, [email protected] Patricia A. Ganea, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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How Could Children’s Storybooks Promote Empathy? A Conceptual Framework Based on Developmental Psychology and Literary Theory

Natalia kucirkova.

1 Institute of Education, University College London, London, United Kingdom

2 Norwegian Centre for Learning Environment and Behavioural Research in Education, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

This conceptual paper proposes a framework for understanding the developmental mechanisms and literary characteristics that bind children’s storybooks with empathy. The article begins with a taxonomy of empathy composed of three key continuous dimensions: cognitive/emotional empathy, empathy for in-group and out-group members and empathy with positive and negative consequences. Insights from developmental psychology and literary theory form the basis for an interdisciplinary framework based on three premises: (1) book-reading can support empathy if it fosters in-group/out-group identification and minimizes in-group/out-group bias; (2) identification with characters who are dissimilar from the readers is the most valuable contribution of children’s storybooks to cognitive empathy; and (3) the quality of language positions children’s storybooks as an exceptional, but not exclusive, empathy-building form of fictional narratives. Implications for future intervention and empirical work are provided.

Introduction

Empathy has been heralded as the key remedy to solve the disparities between major divisions in the currently interconnected globalized world ( Krznaric, 2014 ), including countering toxic masculinity ( Zimbardo, 2017 ) or the isolation and jealousy created by social media ( Borba, 2016 ). As part of this encompassing role for empathy, there is an increasingly popular view among several authors, publishers, educators and literacy organizations, that storybook reading is the primary strategy to nurture children’s empathy skills. Slogans such as “Books build empathy” and initiatives such as the annual Empathy Day celebrated in United Kingdom schools, illustrate the enthusiasm of using children’s literature to promote empathy with “empathy-building books.” There is solid, undisputable evidence on the importance of book-reading for children’s language and literacy development (see Horst and Houston-Price, 2015 for a review). Hence, the question is not whether but how could children’s story-books be used in schools to promote additional outcomes, including empathy. Progress in answering this question has been made by several disciplines but mostly by developmental psychologists and literary critics. Yet, their joint contribution to the fundamental interactions between children’s reading of storybooks and empathy development is not reflected in current empirical and practical approaches. This paper addresses the current precision, conceptual and empirical inconsistencies.

Precision Inconsistencies

Despite the frequent use of the word ‘empathy’ in common parlance, there are ongoing scholarly arguments about what empathy involves, how it can be operationalized and fostered in typical and atypical populations (see Sopcak et al., 2016 ). The word empathy is used to describe a set of different skills in different fields. Educationalists use empathy synonymously with several socio-emotional skills, but developmental psychologists understand these as distinct skills: theory of mind, perspective-taking, emotional literacies and emotional intelligences. Although we might treat these empathy-related phenomena as a conceptual cluster for convenience of expression, lumping them under one umbrella term of empathy creates several conceptual difficulties (see Decety and Cowell, 2014 ). For example, in social work education, there seems to be a perception that empathy is always a positive capacity ( Grant, 2014 ). Yet, from a developmental perspective, theory of mind and perspective-taking have both positive and negative sides: enhanced theory of mind skills do not ‘simply, directly and inevitably translate into appropriate social behaviours.’ ( Wellman, 2014 , p. 61), because children’s enhanced theory of mind can also lead to anti-social behaviors such as lying and bullying. Furthermore, neurological studies and studies with specific populations of children, such as those on the autism spectrum disorder, show that some people have impaired affective but intact cognitive empathy and there is a significant qualitative difference between cognitive and emotional empathy skills in typically and atypically developing children ( Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, 2004 ). A meaningful application in specific contexts, such as in children’s reading, therefore requires a clear specification of which type of empathy might be promoted by books.

The second conceptual issue concerns the distinction between empathy for in-group and out-group members. In the context of adults’ empathy, Bloom (2017) argues that treating empathy as a moral guide is wrong because it perpetuates an in-group favoritism. Instead, he suggests rational compassion as a mechanism for understanding the mental states of out-group members. For literary theorists, Bloom’s argument does not accord with the fictional nature of stories and the diverse and abstract realities they portray. For developmental psychologists, there is a body of work on the positive and negative consequences of empathy. The distinction between in-group and out-group facets of empathy is thus essential for discussion of moral consequences of reading fictional texts in both adult and children’s populations.

Given the important social and moral role assigned to empathy, it is important to agree on a taxonomy of empathy that consolidates its cognitive and affective components as well as its positive and negative consequences for in- and out-group members. The first research question of this paper therefore is: How can empathy be conceptualized in relation to children’s storybooks? The conceptualisation incorporates insights from developmental psychology and literary theory, which have followed parallel but independent paths in the literature so far.

Conceptual Inconsistencies

Conceptual precision is a sine qua non for empirical evaluations. The purported causal relationship between book reading and empathy is in popular media typically justified with the experimental evidence by Kidd and Castano (2013) , who showed that reading literary fiction was associated with adults’ higher performance scores on theory of mind tasks, in comparison with reading non-fiction or popular fiction. However, the experiment was with adult readers and focused on theory of mind, which is one aspect, but not the only aspect, of empathy. Kidd and Castano (2013) were cautious about over-generalizations, caveating that while literary fiction might promote one type of emotional understanding, popular fiction and non-fiction might contribute differently to empathy. Moreover, motivational factors are essential constituents in readers’ short- and long-term engagement in reading and there are many psychology studies that point to the relationships between motivation, reading and empathy (e.g., Zaki, 2014 ).

The use of storybooks as empathy-building vehicles therefore needs to be considered in light of their specific affordances and the motivational catalysts that contribute to empathy-related outcomes. The second research question takes into account empirical evidence from developmental psychology and literary studies to ask: What are the mechanisms to support empathy through children’s storybooks?

Empirical Deficiencies

Children’s books are considered an essential vehicle to discuss emotions and feelings, yet, empirical studies on the relationship between empathy and reading have been almost entirely preoccupied with adult readers and correlational. Research to date with adult readers shows that reading literary prose/literary fiction is related to readers’ ability to understand others (e.g., Mar et al., 2006 ). Crucially, recent research has shown that reading literary fiction in the digital format diminishes this effect ( Mangen and Kuiken, 2014 ). Given that the studies are correlational, it is important to note the opposite direction of the presumed relationship, namely evidence that shows that people who are more empathic are more attracted to fiction (see Mar, 2018 ).

A body of experimental research with children shows that books can teach children cognitive skills, such as expressive and receptive language (e.g., Mendelsohn et al., 2001 ), or problem-solving and communication (e.g., Murray and Egan, 2014 ). Extant experimental research on children’s digital books is by and large preoccupied with cognitive outcomes, such as vocabulary learning and story comprehension (e.g., Bus et al., 2015 ; Dore et al., 2018 ) or qualitative explorations of parent–child dynamics during book reading (e.g., Chaudron et al., 2015 ). However, there is scarce research (cf. Kumschick et al., 2014 ) to support the view propagated by many best-selling children’s authors that their books “teach children empathy.” The specific features and mechanisms involved in storybook reading are multiple but this does not justify generic interventions, which are currently used to teach children empathy through commercially produced stories, profit-making programs and professional gate-keeping.

The third research question aims to trace the key factors identified by literary theory and developmental psychology in relation to storybooks and empathy and asks: which characteristics make children’s books a unique context for supporting children’s empathy development? Answering this question aims to provide a balanced view on the value of storybooks to foster children’s empathy in relation to other popular forms of narratives for children (e.g., educational films and video games).

This Article

Against the backdrop of a conceptual and operational controversy concerning empathy, this paper aims to offer a nuanced and research-informed view on what early reading of storybooks might offer for children’s empathy. The theorized contribution of children’s developmental trajectory and literary techniques is mobilized to formulate a conceptual framework for empathy-building through children’s storybooks (EBCS for short). The review of studies focuses on children aged between two to eight because there is not enough scope to discuss age-related differences in empathy-related skills across a wider age span. The term reading is used in the broadest sense and interchangeably with story engagement to convey that even if young children are not proficient at decoding letters they derive meaning and pleasure from stories with the help of adult readers and this has an impact on their empathy-related skills. The focus is on children’s reading of storybooks , which are fictional narratives arranged in the form of a printed and bound text, structured as a beginning, middle and an end in a coherent structure governed by causality and temporality rules.

Storybooks can be prefaced with different nouns and adjectives and become specific categories of fictional narratives with distinct attributes. For example, picture storybooks are studied by literary scholars (e.g., Agosto, 1999 ; Nikolajeva and Scott, 2013 ) and interactive storybooks are studied by researchers in media studies (e.g., Adam and Wild, 1997 ). Nikolajeva (2014a) has discussed the role of aesthetic synergy for image/text, brain laterality and emotional literacy and Mangen (2008) has theorized the role of the digital format in influencing adults’ empathy in reading literary fiction. Due to space restrictions and the complexity of arguments involved in how different modalities relate to authors’ stylistic choices and how these might influence brain activity and emotional responses, the conceptual framework is limited to text-based storybooks and narratives represented in written words .

The third scope limitation relates to the specific fields of literary theory and developmental psychology rather than the study of children’s literature more widely and all divisions and sub-divisions of psychology. The different empirical focus and theoretical perspectives of literary theory and developmental psychology could be particularly complementary in identifying the role of storybooks in children’s empathy, which accords with calls for interdisciplinary approaches to studying children’s contemporary reading experiences (see Mangen and Van der Weel, 2016 ).

The study of literary theory and cognitive poetics covers a wide range of children’s books and involves an extensive quality analysis of the books’ features (note that children’s literature scholarship also includes children’s responses to books, using reader-response theory, social semiotics and other related disciplines). In contrast, developmental psychologists study the parent–child language around a book and they focus on children’s direct engagement with the book’s features. The EBCS framework includes insights from literary theory and developmental psychology because knowledge from the two disciplines is essential to realize the full potential of children’s reading and yet, the two disciplines tend to be represented by separate research communities that employ different research methods and rarely interact in joint publications or cross-disciplinary journals.

The article is structured as follows: the first section tackles the difficulties inherent in generic descriptors and inconsistent nomenclatures related to empathy. Drawing on developmental psychology, the developmental and socio-cultural basis for conceptualizing empathy in the context of children’s reading is introduced. The conceptual nuances of literary characteristics of children’s storybooks are combined with the terms used by developmental psychologists in describing the specific skills and abilities linked to empathy. The joint contribution of the disciplines results in a more precise conceptualisation, which forms the basis of the EBCS framework.

The second section provides the theoretical and analytical considerations necessary for establishing the mechanisms between children’s storybooks and empathy. Insights from literary theory and developmental psychology are synthesized to formulate a theory of change model which underpins empathy-building through children’s storybooks.

In the final section, the key empirical evidence available in literary theory and developmental psychology literatures is brought together for evaluating the potentially unique role of storybooks in fostering children’s empathy. The three sections build three premises of the EBCS conceptual framework, illustrated in three graphs.

Conceptualization of Empathy in Early Childhood

The multifaceted nature of empathy.

Empathy is known to be ‘a complex phenomenon that involves different intergroup, interpersonal and intrapersonal processes and mechanisms’ ( Bertrand et al., 2018 , n.d). The multidimensionality of empathy creates a fertile ground for its interdisciplinary study: empathy is studied and richly theorized in natural sciences as well as humanities and a single definition cannot cover the varied conceptualizations across various schools of thought.

Literary theory does not readily provide the vocabulary necessary for exacting the skills, abilities and dispositions involved in empathy-related phenomena. This section therefore draws primarily on developmental psychology to establish the specific facets of empathy related to children’s storybooks. Readers interested in how other psychology-related fields define empathy might find it useful to consult the reviews by Davis (1994) in social psychology, Decety and Jackson (2004) in behavioral and neurological sciences, Gallese (2001) in neuroscience, Cialdini et al. (1997) in personality psychology, White (1997) in clinical nursing, Beven et al. (2004) in forensic and legal psychology and Gilbert (2005) in relation to compassion in psychotherapy.

The Developmental Trajectory of Empathy

Neurological and medical aspects of empathy suggest that empathy involves a recognition of other person’s feelings and a response to it, that is understanding another person’s mental state and acting on this understanding ( Baron-Cohen, 2011 ). The recognition and response are both cognitive and emotional ( Hoffman, 2001 ; Perry and Shamay-Tsoory, 2013 ). Cognitive empathy is the ‘capacity to engage in the cognitive process of adopting another person’s psychological point of view’ (ibid, p. 180), while emotional empathy involves ‘emotional contagion, emotional recognition, and shared pain’ (ibid, p. 179). From a neuroscientific perspective, the functional mechanisms of human cognition provide the foundation for a shared space of a self-other identity, which is bridged by mirror neurons (frontoparietal mirror-neuron areas, see Uddin et al., 2007 ), which, through the recognition of others’ actions, support self-representation. From Gallese’s (2005) neuroscientific perspective, mirror neurons instantiate a shared space that ‘blends the interacting individuals’ (p. 111) and provide a multimodal representation of organism-object relations. Mirror neurons, however, have been discovered and studied in adult populations. Developmental psychologists study the extent to which emotional and cognitive empathy are innate or can be nurtured in young children. There is a field consensus that emotional empathy appears earlier than cognitive empathy in a child’s developmental trajectory. For example, an early precursor to empathy is infants’ reactive cry: infants cry when they hear other infants crying and this cry is different from the cry when they are in discomfort (see Sagi and Hoffman, 1976 ). However, the ability to understand what others might think and use this information to, for example, intentionally deceive them, is a different cognitive skill. Cognitive empathy requires a child’s understanding of the beliefs and intentions of other people. In a very simplified way, we could consider the affective type of empathy to be more implicit and innate and the cognitive type more explicit and effortful because it requires the ability to mentalize, which children typically acquire between the age of three and four ( Fonagy, 2018 ). Correspondingly, some disorders can be selectively related to either cognitive or affective empathy. Children with autism for example, are considered to have impaired cognitive empathy ( Frith et al., 1991 ).

Cognitive empathy is synonymous with interpersonal empathy and social cognition , which refer to the human ability to mentalize and understand what other people think. In developmental psychology, social cognition involves the study of children’s theory of mind and perspective-taking. Social cognition requires more cognitive resources than emotional empathy ( Saxe, 2006 ) and its development can be supported with specific techniques, strategies and resources. Therefore, from the developmental psychology perspective, if there is a relationship between children’s books and empathy, then it is more likely to be related to its cognitive variant. Given the focus on children’s storybooks in this article, cognitive empathy in the EBCS conceptual framework is foregrounded, acknowledging that children derive significant pleasure and enjoyment from reading their favorite stories.

The Two Key Components of Cognitive Empathy

Perspective-taking.

Psychologists and clinicians use the term perspective-taking to describe children’s ability to differentiate between others’ and children’s own perspectives and to mentally imagine themselves into the shoes of someone else ( Newman, 1986 ). The acquisition of perspective-taking skills has been observed in children around the age of three and four (see Wellman, 1992 ). Perspective-taking is an important research area in social psychology, where it is considered to encompass the ability to reason about how others perceive and understand the world and using this understanding to adjust one’s own view of others. Perspective-taking is thus not only about understanding but also actively overcoming one’s preconceived ideas, which can include biases and stereotypes (see Galinsky and Moskowitz, 2000 ) and inhabiting self-oriented (egocentric) views ( Epley et al., 2004 ).

Although perspective-taking is well-known in lifespan theories of self-other differentiation, the term ‘decentering’ is specific to early childhood studies and was first extensively theorized by Jean Piaget. Montangero and Maurice-Naville (2013 , p. 97) explain that according to Piaget, decentering is a ‘process of progressive dissociation or coordination’ and is tightly linked with children’s actions that start from concretization of ideas and progress to comparison and coordination. Both perspective-taking and decentering are about a child’s de-association from a subjective point of view. Redmond (1983) suggested that decentering would be a more encompassing term than perspective-taking but since 1980s, decentering has been mostly used in relation to Piaget’s original conceptualization.

Theory of Mind

Perspective-taking is different from, but closely related to, children’s theory of mind (ToM). First coined by Premack and Woodruff (1978) in their study with chimpanzees, ToM is a social ability to integrate into a coherent understanding what other people desire, believe or think ( Gopnik et al., 1997 ). Early ToM studies focused on children’s understanding of false beliefs and investigating whether toddlers can recognize that other people have intentions different from theirs (see Carpendale and Chandler, 1996 ). More recent ToM studies combine neuro-imagining data with children’s accounts and show that there are networks of brain regions specifically related to ToM. For example, Saxe and Kanwishera (2003) showed that the temporo-parietal junction becomes activated when adults think about the mental state of other people. Language development goes hand in hand with empathy development and indeed, children’s ability to express how they and other people feel is another precursor for ToM. Parent–child engagement in conversational turns is a significant predictor for children’s language development, with distinct neural patterns identified in children who engage in frequent and responsive conversations with their parents ( Romeo et al., 2018 ).

The key point of distinction in the psychological explanation of cognitive empathy is the difference between empathy for in-group and out-group members. This difference relates to the physical/psychological and perceived/felt distance between others and self , and is essential for understanding the positive and negative outcomes related to empathy.

In- and Out-Group Empathy

From an evolutionary perspective, people experience an innate ‘intersubjective sympathy’ for in-group members ( Trevarthen, 1979 ). This vicarious, somatic experience of shared emotions has been observed in several species that live in small social groups and express homophily (see Preston and de Waal, 2002 , for an overview). Sympathy is not empathy but from a behavioural standpoint, the in-group/out-group distinction is intercorrelated with the cognitive/affective intersection in empathy. Neurological data show that different brain regions are involved in empathy for ingroup members versus empathy for humankind more broadly ( Mathur et al., 2010 ). An in-group preference or positive group identification can support group belonging ( Brewer, 1979 ), status stability and legitimacy ( Struch and Schwartz, 1989 ), but it can also lead to a bias toward out-group members ( Cikara and Van Bavel, 2014 ). There are negative consequences for both in- and out-group biases and there is evidence that White ethnic 3–4-year olds favor their ingroup members and show prejudice toward members of minority ethnic groups, with a decline for some children across middle childhood ( Aboud, 2008 ).

The scientific jury is out on why in-group/out-group biases occur. From a sociological perspective, the in-group/out-group relationship is a fluid and dynamic process of negotiation related to three aspects of social categorization: positive affect, affiliation and social desirability ( Zaki, 2014 ). Empathy is thus part of an ongoing bi-directional communicative act: ‘our relationships influence our emotions, and our emotions reciprocally influence our relationships’ (p. 2, Saarni, 1999 ). From a developmental perspective, there is an interesting parallel between older adults’ and young children’s preference for contact with close family members as opposed to peripheral friends and family members at early and late stages of life ( Hess et al., 2009 ). The lacuna of studies on lifelong development makes it difficult to establish direct links between children’s and adults’ capacity of perspective-taking, but longitudinal evidence suggests a modest negative relation between age and perspective-taking ( Pratt et al., 1996 ), with loss in perspective-taking documented in the elderly.

Premise 1 of the EBCS Framework

If we synthesize the insights from decades of developmental psychology research on social cognition, we arrive at two dimensions that need to be incorporated into a conceptualisation of empathy-building with children’s storybooks: positive/negative valence of cognitive empathy and empathy toward in-group/out-group members. Children’s storybooks could potentially foster children’s cognitive empathy through a recognition and response toward in- and out-group members. The process of identification with others is a process influenced by group formation and social categorization, which leads to different outcomes, including group-belonging as well as bias. If we distil these tenets into a simple schema, we obtain a graph that identifies in-group/out-group and positive/negative outcomes of cognitive empathy. As Figure 1 shows, the Y -axis is the degree of affiliation with others (in-group versus out-group), while the X -axis represents the extent to which one’s social cognition is positive or negative. Their intersection creates four possible behavioral outcomes: when individuals identify with members of society who share their views/characteristics or experiences, they might experience a sense of belonging as well as in-group favoritism and out-group hostility. Conversely, if an individual mentalizes with out-group members without identifying with them, then that individual is likely to engage in what Bloom (2017) termed rational compassion. The graph illustrates that children’s books could potentially foster four possible pathways implicated in cognitive empathy.

Types of identification and biases between readers and story protagonists.

This leads us to premise1 of the EBCS framework: book-reading can support children’s positive and negative cognitive empathy as it fosters both in-group/out-group identification and in-group/out-group bias. An immediate implication of this proposition is that children’s storybooks need to be written and designed to support both types of identification between the ‘other’ and ‘self,’ while avoiding their associated biases. Literary theorists and developmental psychologists could jointly contribute to greater awareness among popular children’s authors and organizations representing them, to ensure that children’s literature does not propagate in-group bias but actively fosters cognitive empathy toward out-group members.

Section I summarizes the theories and empirical data that underpin the key assumptions in the variables connected to cognitive empathy. Section II, that follows, discusses the mechanisms involved in the process that fosters positive outcomes of cognitive empathy with children’s storybooks.

If we have clear criteria of success and some data to predict patterns, we can progress to a prediction of effects. Such theoretical modeling is called a theory of change ( Grant, 2014 ).

Section II: Theory of Change: The Mechanisms Involved in Cognitive Empathy

In evaluation and performance monitoring, a theory of change is used to capture the process of how and why activities lead to desired outcomes. The concept of theory of change is used in this paper as a shorthand for explaining the potential pathways in which book reading could strengthen children’s cognitive empathy. Note that to discuss possible main and interaction effects, it is necessary to artificially separate the flows of individual components in the empathy process. The model is based on work by literary theorists and developmental psychologists concerning selective engagement in activities, the relationship between narrative fiction and empathy, and the role of personal relevance in story immersion and identification.

Engagement and Motivation

Selective engagement.

The neuropsychological and developmental literature agree that individuals respond to people based on the extent to which they feel close to them. There is one principle, Hess (2014) argues, that is applicable across the lifespan and possibly related to the in-group preference at the early and late stages of life: selective engagement. Hess’ (2006) Selective Engagement Hypothesis posits that individuals selectively allocate their cognitive and affective resources to engagements with others if the engagements offer a return of investment either in the form of increased knowledge (information-seeking) or emotion (affection-seeking behavior). This chimes with Wynn et al. (2017) , who argue that children ‘naturally favor people whom they see as good individuals and who fall into their social groups’ (p. 2). The researchers describe babies and young children as ‘selective altruists’ and argue that the selective helping model in babies is propagated by three key developmental reasons: a child’s group belonging, past behavior and prior interactions with the other person ( Wynn et al., 2017 ). A distinguishing contribution of the selective engagement hypothesis to the empathy discussion is that it introduces the importance of motivation in taking an action. If children are to learn empathy skills through books, then first and foremost, they need to be motivated to engage in reading the book.

Motivation Catalysts

Motivation can be manipulated through various “catalysts” for empathy, which Bertrand et al. (2018) identified to be ‘emotionally safe environment, multicultural, collaborative, dynamic, engaging activities to stimulate openness, facilitators to support the learning process.’ Bertrand et al. (2018) include three methodologies that can train emphatic abilities: role-playing, mindfulness training and Enhancing Self-Regulation of Behavioral Expressions (e.g., Exhaustive practice of negation). Interestingly, the authors do not include literary fiction or written stories in their review but this omission might be attributable to their focus on virtual reality as a key mechanism for empathy training. We can think of Bertrand et al’s “catalysts for empathy” as the external and internal factors that contribute to a desired outcome. In a theory of change model, catalysts are called enablers and the outcomes are called outputs ( Harries et al., 2014 ). In the EBCS model, the inputs are the cognitive and emotional resources, which a child employs to engage in book-reading. While the avoidance and regulatory motivation strategies involved in an emphatic response are widely known and studied in developmental psychology literature (e.g., Feldman, 2015 ; Doenyas, 2017 ), literary theorists place an emphasis on the literary characteristics of books involved in eliciting an emphatic response in readers. For literary theorists, there are the two key explanatory pathways for the relationship between storybooks and empathy: fiction and narratives.

Fiction and Narratives

Narratives are a principal organizational structure for human thinking ( Bruner, 1991 ). When paying attention to narratives, people tend to follow the experience of the protagonist, whether the narrative is represented in a written, pictorial or oral mode, thus directly practicing perspective-taking ( Black et al., 1979 ). Mar and Oatley (2008) reviewed adults’ experience with narrative fiction in various formats, including novels, films and plays, and theorized that the experience is similar to a cognitive and emotional simulation of social experience and therefore might improve perspective-taking abilities. They argue that while the form/format or the fictional/non-fictional nature of stories are important considerations, it is narrative that is fundamental for perspective-taking.

The seminal work by Nikolajeva on children’s reading of fiction ( Nikolajeva, 2009 , 2014a , b ) highlights the fictional nature of narratives written for young children. Given that in storybooks, the characters represent people or, in the case of children’s books, sometimes personified animals, their experiences simulate social experiences. These simulated, abstract experiences allow readers, including young readers, practicing their awareness of what people in different situations might feel or experience.

What is interesting to note is the different research priorities and the different direction of travel between empathy and text, identified by literary theorists and developmental psychologists. According to Maine and Waller (2011) , empathy acts as a ‘tool of engagement’ in reading, while for psychologists, there is an opposite direction of travel: motivation drives individuals to either engage or disengage with the perspectives and emotions of others ( Zaki, 2014 ). This difference in emphasis is reflected in the explanatory pathways provided by the two disciplines for how storybooks could foster children’s empathy.

Explanatory Pathways in Developmental Psychology

Developmental psychologists study the empathy-building potential of the environment in which children’s storybooks are read (i.e., language around the book), the books’ content (i.e., language inside the book) and they also look beyond the printed page (i.e., the books’ format). These distinct elements are in bidirectional inter-relationship to developmental variables and they jointly constitute a complex matrix of enablers and outputs. There are three distinct research contributions that bring cohesive insight into the EBCS framework: environmental catalysts, adult-child talk, and metacognitive language.

Environmental Catalysts

Most children of pre- and early primary-school-age are introduced to storybooks at home or in formal learning environments (such as schools and kindergartens) which are key “catalysts” for creating the empathy-inviting environment that Bertrand et al. (2018) described. The family structure provides a natural environment for parent–child conversations about in-group members’ feelings and perspectives. In a classic developmental text, Dunn and Kendrick (1982) outline how parents nurture children’s theory of mind by discussing the feelings and beliefs of siblings. It should be noted that children are able to fully benefit from meta-language conversations only when they can construct a coherent view of self and organize their autobiographical memories. This is typically achieved between the ages of three to five ( Thompson, 2000 ). In the school environment, adults’ facilitation of empathic education programs, which include discussions of emotions and personal experiences, can promote children’s understanding of different views and reduce bullying ( Şahin, 2012 ). Children’s cognitive empathy can be also trained by directly talking to children about mental states, as demonstrated by Guajardo and Watson (2002) in relation to narrative discourse and theory of mind. The key characteristics of effective empathy-building school environments are provision of explicit prompts to think about other people’s perspectives and the adults’ mediation of children’s understanding through conversation and direct discussion of views, emotions and experiences.

Adult-Child Talk During Storybook Reading

In the context of adult-child book reading, books act as a joint object of reference for conversation about story characters’ feelings and thoughts ( Symons et al., 2005 ). Some children’s books are an important source of mental state information, but it is the mothers’ use of mental state talk that can have a positive impact on children’s theory of mind understanding ( Ruffman et al., 2002 ). Although everyday conversations at home might offer many opportunities for discussing how other people feel and think, parent–child conversations around storybooks offer unique opportunity for parents to discuss mental states of people their children don’t know. During shared book-reading, parents ask their children, for example, how they think the story protagonists feel, why the character might have acted in a certain way or what the character might think will happen on the next page. Mothers use various emotional words (to enjoy, to be afraid) and their own empathy levels are linked to the amount of ability states (e.g., ‘you can do it’) that they refer to during book sharing ( Rollo and Sulla, 2016 ). Children whose mothers used cognitive verbs such as think, believe, remember, know or understand, during book-reading showed higher understanding of mental states after the book reading session ( Adrián et al., 2007 ). In these exchanges, mothers’ talk was contingent upon the child’s response, as the mothers typically elaborated on aspects that they presumed the child might have found unclear and provided a cognitive scaffolding for the child’s understanding of the story details. Children too, engage in talking more about mental states during book reading than during everyday conversations, especially if they are older than 3 years and can fully appreciate the different beliefs and feelings portrayed in picture books ( Sabbagh and Callanan, 1998 ).

Metacognitive Language

The content of children’s storybooks conveys the story protagonists’ emotional states through pictures and words. Dyer et al. (2000) analyzed the amount of mental state language in 45 children’s picture books for 3–4-year-olds and in 45 books for 5–6-year-olds and found that books for 5–6-year-olds had more varied and more frequent mental state references, mostly represented in words and through the use of irony but less so via pictures. Textual references to mental states of story characters provide explanatory anchors for mentalizing because they approximate to children the characters’ thinking and feelings. However, Peskin and Astington (2004) found that a higher number of metacognitive terms in books does not necessarily improve children’s understanding of mental terms. Although more metacognitive terms in a book were related to children’s more frequent use of such terms, it was the adults’ mediation that helped children infer character’s mental states from their visual representation in the book.

Thus, according to developmental psychology, some storybooks provide explicit prompts for discussing out-group members’ perspectives but the effects are likely to be increased if the book-reading is mediated by adults who engage in conversational turns with the child and scaffold the child’s understanding of diverse perspectives and emotions. This leads us to a theory of change model that delineates how empathy is triggered, what it promotes and why it matters for children’s development. Figure 2A schematically captures this process.

(A) Theory of change of reading and empathy emerging from developmental psychology. (B) Theory of change of reading and empathy emerging from the literary theory.

Explanatory Pathways in Literary Theory

Based on literary theory, we can infer that children’s books create optimal conditions for supporting children’s cognitive empathy if there is a skilful use of narrative techniques to enhance readers’ identification with the story protagonist(s) who are unlike them because they are fictional. The summary of the key insights from literary theory is limited to the aspects that add a unique dimension to developmental psychology’s perspective: literary techniques, story immersion and story identification.

Literary Techniques in Fictional Narratives

Keen (2007) highlights the complex relationship between empathy and narrative techniques such as the use of first or third person or past and present tense. She posits that each technique has different consequences for empathy depending on the book’s topic and the reading situation. Composition techniques studied by literary theorists include the point of view that authors employ for recounting the story (first, second, or third person); the authors’ choice of tense (present, past, and future), originality of the topic and its depiction, authentic voice, use of humor or irony and others. All elements need to fit the purpose and theme of the story and be adjusted to the story representation. For example, the first person in a written story involves more persuasion of subjectivity than the first person employed in oral narratives ( Nielsen, 2004 ). The choice of present tense can enhance a story’s immediacy but it can also limit the reader’s imaginative landscape as ‘it confines the reader’s vicarious experience to a single consciousness in a temporal singularity’ ( Nikolajeva, 2014a , p. 88).

Story Immersion

Put simply, story immersion refers to the feeling of presence in the story-world created by an author. In the context of video games, McMahan (2003) specifies that immersion is contingent upon the story plot, the context of the story or unfolding narrative. In the context of book-reading, authors who can achieve readers’ immersion are authors whose books have become ‘books that can’t be put down’ and books that stir a personal response. Story immersion is directly linked to the delight that readers derive from engaging with a narrative and feelings of positive engagement and flow ( Douglas and Hargadon, 2000 ). There are several story-telling elements that authors need to carefully combine to achieve the desired immersion effect in their readers. There is no single formula for this effect, but there are some common elements that are relevant for reader engagement, albeit in different ways. These include authors’ judicious choice of one of the five options of story movements (linear, meandering, spiral, branching, and explosive story movement, see Truby, 2008 ) and choice of a suitable textual level (e.g., the textual level among the text, writer and reader or the textual levels among various texts, see Nikolajeva, 2015 ). Nikolajeva (2009) anticipates the use of present tense and first-person narrator to bring the protagonist and reader closer to each other, but cautions against what she terms ‘immersive identification’ with story characters, as this would impede the possibility for perspective-taking.

Naturally, not every book, even if carefully crafted, will resonate with every child. This is where story immersion intersects with another important motivation-related aspect of storybooks: readers’ identification with the story characters.

Story Identification

Nikolajeva’s (2014b) key thesis is that fiction should offer readers stories that are beyond their real-life experiences. This departure from personal experience alerts motivation in reading and emphatic engagement. The main motivation to read fiction comes from the desire to experience something the readers have not experienced themselves and identifying with characters who are fictional, for example unfamiliar settings and situations in horror stories or fantasy, with unfamiliar characters, such as monsters, wizards, or superheroes. Nikolajeva’s specification acknowledges the need for a balance between two key aspects of empathy (cognitive/affective) and its two ideals (empathy toward in-group and out-group members). The story immersion/character identification is a useful way for thinking about the optimal equilibrium necessary for a reader’s engagement with the narrative and identification with a story protagonist. Taken together, insights from literary theory bring us to a slightly different theory of change model for children’s story books and empathy, captured in Figure 2B.

With these insights, we can tentatively formulate a theory of change that accounts for the relationship between story immersion, story identification and in-group/out-group empathy promoted by children’s narrative fiction. We could assume that the relationship between immersion and story engagement is a positive correlation: the more a child is immersed in a story, the more they are engaged with the narrative, deriving pleasure and delight from the reading experience. However, if we bring in the developmental psychology literature to this, we can add that the increased engagement mobilizes the cognitive resources necessary for engaging in cognitive empathy and the social cognition necessary for understanding protagonists who are unlike us.

In Figure 3 , the X -axis represents the story immersion spectrum (from no interest in the book to a high state of flow) and the Y -axis represents the perceived/felt distance between the reader and story protagonist. For illustrative purposes, the graph presupposes linearity between the variables so that the axes yield the borders of four quadrants that correspond to four possible outcomes. As indicated in the graph with the red square, Quadrant 4 illustrates the most desirable outcome: children’s high immersion in the story and high identification with story characters who are unlike them . As explained with the developmental trajectory literature, the cognitive resources that children need to employ to understand a protagonist who is different from their personal experience are higher than those required for identifying with a story character who shares their identity markers. Therefore, identification with characters dissimilar from the reader and the reader’s high immersion in the book requires most effort on the part of both the reader and the author. This outcome brings to fore the importance of literary craft in motivating children to read and using this motivation to foster the most resourceful type of empathy, that for out-group members.

Schema of the strongest empathy-building potential of storybooks.

Quadrant 4 also highlights that immersive stories do not necessarily create story characters that children can fully identify with. Quadrant 3 illustrates the corollary scenario where high story immersion is linked to high motivation to read, with feelings of flow and enjoyment of the story. However, unlike in the scenario depicted in Quadrant 4, higher immersion and higher personal relevance of the story character to the reader means empathizing with protagonists who share the readers’ characteristics (support of in-group cognitive empathy). Quadrant2 illustrates the case of personalized books where the story character is the child (e.g., the story hero is named after the child as it is the case in the personalized books by, for example, I See Me Ltd. ). Quadrant 1 shows that strong identification with a story character (e.g., children seeing a popular character such as Peppa Pig in a book) can elicit their interest but combined with low immersion in the story, leads to higher need for environmental catalysts to support children’s interest in reading. Quadrants 1 and 2 demonstrate that low-quality books might engage children in reading but offer little to their cognitive empathy development.

The theory of change modeling leads to the second premise of the EBCS conceptual model: narrative fiction books are likely to promote children’s cognitive empathy for in-group members if they engage the child and if they feature story characters that children can readily identify with. The closer the personal relevance of the story to the child’s own life, the higher the likelihood for immersion, identification and in-group empathy. Conversely, children’s books are likely to promote children’s cognitive empathy for out-group members if they engage the child and at the same time, if they feature story protagonists with whom the readers can identify but who are dissimilar from their own lives. Literary theorists and developmental psychologists agree that a focus on out-group members is the most valuable characteristic of children’s storybooks, but while for literary theory the key motivational mechanism lies in the fictional nature of narratives, for developmental psychologists it is the role of adults’ mediation. These disciplinary nuances are crucial to attend to in building prediction models, evaluating various interventions and studying the relative influence of individual factors in research studies.

The focus on fictional narratives and story-related catalysts beckons the question: what is the specific role that children’s literature plays in cognitive empathy? In other words, there is a need to specify the catalysts (enablers) and the fictional nature of storybooks in relation to children’s engagement with narrative fictional storybooks. This conceptual specification is the goal of the third premise in the EBCS conceptual framework.

Section III: The Unique Properties of Storybooks Relevant for Cognitive Empathy

According to Harries et al., 2014 , a theory of change is effective if the activities in the model are based on unique qualities. Put more exactly, if we want to promote programs focused on empathy-building skills with books , then we need to be able to explain why empathy-building through books might be superior to other narrative representations. There are several types of narratives: oral storytelling, static and moving picture, audio stories, digital and written texts. Some fictional narrative contexts include a direct adoption of another person’s perspective, such as role-play, pretend play, drama and virtual reality. These fictional narrative contexts furnish the experience of perceiving the world from the perspective of another person, which, Mar and Oatley (2008) argue, might promote cognitive empathy. The mechanisms identified by literary theorists could therefore work for any narrative fiction. Similarly, the mechanisms identified by developmental psychologists, such as the presence of mental state language in narratives and its mediation by parents, could also occur in parent–child joint use of video games or watching educational TV.

Claims of superiority of one narrative context over another would require evidence of causality but for ethical and practical reasons, developmental psychologists cannot offer longitudinal evidence on the unique impact of storybooks in isolation from other narrative activities. Nevertheless, cross-sectional studies that examine the relative importance of one context against each other and match different media/representational modes according to specific criteria (e.g., the same narrative delivered on an iPad, via PC and in print), can offer some insights into how storybooks compare to other narrative contexts in relation to specific design or content features. The principal feature examined by extant experimental research concerned with different narrative contexts, is interactivity.

Interactivity Across Contexts and Media

Comparative studies focused on children’s story comprehension and vocabulary learning in relation to different story formats and these studies converge that children’s learning is impeded by higher presence of interactivity (see e.g., Parish-Morris et al., 2013 ). The experimental studies suggest that interactivity interferes with children’s ability to focus and concentrate, which relates to recent neurological findings. Hutton et al., 2018 measured active imagery and self-reflection in pre-school children with functional magnetic resonance imaging in relation to picture-based, audio and interactive representation of the same story. They found that the illustrated format was more helpful and the animated format the least helpful for children’s self-reflection and active imagery. Based on these findings, we could tentatively assume that textual and static pictorial representation in children’s storybooks is conducive to children’s greater attention to the story. Whether this heightened focus can promote stronger perspective-taking and theory of mind is to be verified by empirical research. What is crucial, however, is the type of interactivity that might potentially interfere with children’s focus and attention to the story. However, literary theorists have proposed that some interactive features could be centrally implicated in children’s empathy-building with digital books.

Types of Interactivity in Children’s Digital Storybooks

Zhao and Unsworth (2016) proposed that the opportunity to directly manipulate characters different from the child can contribute to children’s identification with them. They analyzed the specific features of a digital book (app) The Heart and the Bottle , and describe scenes where the user directly interacts with the story protagonist, which triggers a change in the thought bubble next to this character (e.g., moving the main protagonist across the screen changes the thought bubble from a happy memory of a grandfather to a sad memory of the grandfather’s departure). Drawing on Unsworth’s previous work, Zhao and Unsworth (2016) conclude that the app ‘constitutes an interpretative possibility ( Unsworth, 2014a ) of the story, a version of interpretation that creates ‘amplified empathy’ ( Unsworth, 2014b ; Zhao and Unsworth, 2016 , p. 98).’ Similarly, Turrión (2014) and Al-Yaqout and Nikolajva (2015) argue that embodied engagement with story characters in digital interactive books, where readers replicate the actions of the main story characters, might stimulate children’s empathy.

The same text can be delivered digitally, in print or via moving image and each medium carries different interactive affordances that potentially support or interfere with empathy. The comparative studies to date have examined the influence of the format but not the combined influence of the format and content on child’s learning. Moreover, different types of interactivity could be potentially differently implicated in promoting children’s empathy through digital interactive books.

Kucirkova (2017) identified five types of interactivity in contemporary children’s fiction: synaesthesia (Touch manipulation, Audio presentation, Visual presentation, Taste properties, and Odor properties), Scaffolding (Audio, video-recorded or visual prompts, Hyperlinks to other explanatory content), Datafication (GPS tagging and usage tracking, Experience tracking), User control (Attention-directing features, Problem-solving features), and Computer vision techniques (Virtual-reality features such as action stimulator or environment creations, Augmented-reality features such as 3D representations of story characters or story plots). All these features need to be further theorized by literary theorists and experimentally studied by psychologists in different fictional narratives in relation to cognitive empathy.

Individual Studies of Other Narrative Contexts

Based on the current literary theory and developmental psychology literatures, any fictional narrative, verbal, visual, or multimodal, has the potential to foster empathy. This implies that potentially, there are other narrative contexts that could foster children’s emphatic understanding and indeed, there is a wealth of research showing that other media that carry fictional narratives are related to children’s empathy.

More than 80 years ago, Mead (1934) identified children’s participation in role-and pretend play as a significant opportunity to practice reasoning and living as someone else. During pretend play, children can practice false belief and deception and these activities can supplement the use of books. There is also evidence from educational TV programs that empathy-related skills can be fostered through video content. For instance, Mares and Pan (2013) meta-analyzed the effects of the Sesame Street program on children in 15 countries and found a strong positive effect for the category labeled ‘social reasoning,’ which included the sub-category of children’s development of positive attitudes toward social out-groups. The researchers expected a small effect size given that young children’s development of positive attitudes toward visually salient differences (such as disability or race) is often difficult to nurture. The researchers explained that because the Sesame Street characters displayed prosocial behavior with out-group characters, this modeling had a significant effect on children’s perceptions.

Wolf (2018) cites studies with adult readers that show a correlation between reading fiction and cognitive processes that underlie perspective taking and theory of mind in support of the thesis that empathy occurs with high-quality written texts and literary novels. More direct evidence is needed on the specific types of texts and empathy processes in young readers, especially in light of alternative narrative formats and types of fiction. In particular, according to the embodiment perspective, virtually experiencing to be another person is superior than imagining it. It follows that children’s active participation in drama, role-play and pretend play could potentially constitute more effective contexts for empathy-building than storybooks. With adult participants, virtual reality games were found to support empathy because they allow full immersion into the protagonist’s perspective by embodying the protagonist’s body or virtually becoming another person through a digital avatar ( Maselli and Slater, 2013 ). Again, there is no study that would investigate possible differences in the empathy-building potential of different interactive narrative representations such as virtual games, educational videos or digital stories. In the absence of empirical data showing superior effects for text-based storybooks for children’s cognitive empathy, it is difficult to know which format-related features are most effective. The content/format intersection thus offers fertile ground for examining new fictional narrative contexts and their empathy-related potential.

Premise 3 of the EBCS Framework

Taken together, Premise 3 of the EBCS conceptual framework therefore is that children’s storybooks can act as prompts for practicing cognitive empathy if they represent fictional narratives with diverse and frequent references to story characters’ feelings and offer space for adults’ mediation. However, whether written texts (print books) constitute a superior narrative context in comparison to other fictional narrative contexts is not clear from the current literature.

Study Implications

This paper combines multidisciplinary insights to arrive at a grounded framework that locates the key pathways and elements implicated in empathy and children’s written storybooks. The field has advanced in terms of recognizing the distinction, but also the connection, between affective and cognitive types of emphatic responses to books. There is enough empirical evidence to claim that books provide a context for practicing perspective-taking and identifying with the ‘other.’ It is time to move the field forward in relation to the possibly unique relationship between children’s storybooks and empathy and the specifics of the relationship between ‘self’ and the ‘other’ encountered through books. The EBCS framework specifies that not all storybooks promote positive cognitive empathy but those that do, challenge children cognitively and emotionally to understand the perspective of protagonists who are unlike them. The three premises and their operational implications make it clear that children’s storybooks could promote children’s understanding of others’ perspectives if there is a judicious balance between a set of requirements: cognitive/affective empathy, in-/out-group identification, story immersion/character identification, narrative representation in words and adults’ conversational mediation.

Although this premise is implicit in the works of literary theorists and developmental psychologists, it is sometimes not understood by popular children’s authors, who, often unwittingly, promote in-group bias by suggesting that to foster empathy, children should be asked about book characters who are most like them (see the Twitter chat transcript for #EmpathyDay, 10th of June, 2018). Although research has, thus far, not isolated a single factor that would make children’s storybooks a unique medium for empathy-building fictional narratives, there are some questions that educational professionals could be asking about empathy-building books in ascertaining their overall “empathy value.” For example, the EBCS framework could be developed into a rubric of empathy characteristics of children’s storybooks in collaboration with children’s publishers, designers, and developers. Examples of questions are:

Do the identity markers of the main protagonist correspond to those of the reader? [yes indicates lower empathy potential].

Does the storybook contain prompts for adults’ scaffolding and frequent use of meta-language with cognitive verbs (e.g., think, remember, and believe)? [higher score indicates higher empathy potential].

The three premises of the EBCS framework can be used for justifying the development of interventions and resources aimed at developing children’s empathy through storybooks. There are several interventions, programs and organizations that aim to support empathy, with various foci: for example, supporting children’s development of empathy-related behavioral outcomes, such as compassion and caring, through the care for vulnerable groups, such as babies (e.g., Gordon, 2000 ) or animals ( Komorosky and O’Neal, 2015 ); through narrating and acting out children’s own stories (MakeBelieveArts) or promotion of films such as To Kill a Mockingbird or Inside Out and Zootopia (Common Sense Media). The EBCS framework specifies the conditions for gauging children’s empathy-building with books but it cautions against adopting an all-encompassing view of storybooks as the only vehicle for supporting children’s empathy. Future work needs to provide more clarity on the specific influence of the format of fictional narratives and the individual empathy-building features of children’s storybooks. This is important in an era of new story formats, which allow for easy manipulation of selected features, such as interactive or personalized storybooks. Organizations dedicated to promoting children’s empathy through storybooks, such as the United Kingdom-based EmpathyLab, could collaborate with researchers, authors, and educational professionals to ascertain the specific content and format affordances of children’s storybooks implicated in cognitive empathy.

Overall, the three premises of this interdisciplinary conceptual framework provide a necessary foundation to begin to answer empirically and practically the question of how children’s books could promote empathy. This paper argued and demonstrated that the joint work of literary theorists and developmental psychologists is essential to help educational practitioners and policy-makers make discerned decisions about investing in a specific intervention/approach dedicated to supporting children’s empathy. The framework can be applied to characterize the empathy concepts employed by different disciplines and stakeholders interested in nurturing children’s empathy with storybooks, to review earlier attempts and propose future empirical work in the area.

Author Contributions

NK conceptualized the study and led the write-up of the paper.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Professor Maria Nikolajeva for her constructive feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript and Dr. Raymond A. Mar for corrections relevant to his work cited in the manuscript.

Funding. This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/N01779X/1].

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• Published: 28 September 2020

Keep it simple: streamlining book illustrations improves attention and comprehension in beginning readers

• Cassondra M. Eng   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9825-8864 1 ,
• Karrie E. Godwin   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0127-986X 2 &
• Anna V. Fisher 1  

npj Science of Learning volume  5 , Article number:  14 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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This study used eye-tracking to examine whether extraneous illustration details—a common design in beginning reader storybooks—promote attentional competition and hinder learning. The study used a within-subject design with first- and second-grade children. Children ( n  = 60) read a story in a commercially available Standard condition and in a Streamlined condition, in which extraneous illustrations were removed while an eye-tracker recorded children’s gaze shifts away from the text, fixations to extraneous illustrations, and fixations to relevant illustrations. Extraneous illustrations promoted attentional competition and hindered reading comprehension: children made more gaze shifts away from text in the Standard compared to the Streamlined condition, and reading comprehension was significantly higher in the Streamlined condition compared to the Standard condition. Importantly, fixations toward extraneous details accounted for the unique variance in reading comprehension controlling for reading proficiency and attending to relevant illustrations. Furthermore, a follow-up control experiment ( n  = 60) revealed that these effects did not solely stem from enhanced text saliency in the Streamlined condition and reproduced the finding of a negative relationship between fixations to extraneous details and reading comprehension. This study provides evidence that the design of reading materials can be optimized to promote literacy development in young children.

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Introduction.

Learning to read is a crucially important skill because reading provides a gateway for learning within and outside of school. However, many children struggle to acquire the fundamental skill of learning to read and one-third of U.S. elementary school students are not reading at grade level 1 . Many factors contribute to children’s difficulty in learning to read, including (but not limited) to: neurodevelopmental disorders, lagging pre-reading skills (e.g., phonological awareness), and vulnerabilities in general cognitive functioning 2 , 3 , 4 . This study focuses on one potential factor that has received relatively little attention in the literature, namely the design of reading materials for beginning readers.

The typical design of books for beginning readers often includes engaging, colorful, detailed illustrations. There are a number of reasons for including illustrations in books for beginning readers such as defining the setting and characters, contributing to text coherence, reinforcing the text, providing additional information, and motivating the reader 5 , 6 . Yet, attention is a competitive process and only a subset of information can be selected for processing and represented in visual working memory 7 , 8 , 9 . In beginning readers, for whom reading has not yet become an automatized skill, engaging illustrations may compete for attention with text. If illustrations and text indeed compete for children’s attention, then the inclusion of extraneous illustrations may undermine children’s reading comprehension. Looking away from the text at illustrations may result in the encoding of irrelevant details into a working memory which may ultimately disrupt text coherence. It may be difficult for beginning readers to build a strong understanding of the story if they attend to extraneous illustrations while reading. Furthermore, attention regulation skills are still developing during the time when children begin formal reading instruction 10 , 11 , 12 ; therefore, it is important to evaluate the possibility that unnecessary embellishments to educational materials intended to engage children might do so at the cost of disrupting attention and learning 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 . This possibility is particularly important to evaluate in light of the evidence that individual differences in selective attention are related to individual differences in reading skills 17 , 18 , 19 , 20 . Entertaining visuals in children’s educational materials have enormous potential to engage children—but these additional visuals might be counterproductive if they are unrelated to the story text as they may distract children from the primary task (i.e., decoding the words and making meaning from the text).

Extraneous details—also known as seductive details—are often included to increase motivation and foster situational interest 21 . There is a substantial body of research on the detrimental effects of extraneous details in educational materials with adult populations. The inclusion of extraneous details has been found to hinder the ability to recall important ideas and comprehension of material in scientific texts 22 , in lectures 23 , and in online lessons 24 . The Cognitive Load Theory suggests that unnecessary or extraneous material reduces the number of cognitive resources available for the target task and decreases performance and learning outcomes 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 . Multimedia design principles based on the Cognitive Load Theory suggest that when learners have to divide attention between images and text (Split-Attention Principle) and process irrelevant information (Coherence Principle) comprehension is significantly reduced 29 , 30 . In contrast to the large body of research on the design of educational materials for adult learners who are reading-to-learn, relatively few studies have examined this issue in children who are learning-to-read.

There is evidence that specific attributes of picture books influence the experiences of shared book reading for pre-reading children 31 , 32 . For example, Flack and Horst 31 found in shared reading contexts with pre-readers that the presence of multiple illustrations per page was detrimental for children’s word learning 31 . A handful of studies with beginning readers suggests that presenting text without illustrations results in faster reading time and higher accuracy in elementary school students 33 , 34 , 35 . Evidence on the effects of illustrations on reading comprehension is mixed. Some studies suggest beneficial effects of including illustrations in text for beginning readers. For example, Rusted and Coltheart 36 constructed prose passages describing novel creatures and asked 9 to 13-year-old children to read the passages either accompanied by a simple line drawing of a novel creature or without the drawing 36 . The results indicated that including simple line drawings with the passages improved recall of passage details in both good and poor readers. Hannus and Hyönä 37 also reported positive effects of black-and-white line drawings on 4th-grade students’ comprehension of passages in a biology textbook (compared to a no-illustration condition); although, this effect was observed for students who scored high on a separately administered test of non-verbal intelligence and not for students who scored low on this test 37 . Other studies point to the detrimental effects of illustrations in beginning reader materials, particularly for struggling readers and children with learning disabilities. Rose 38 conducted one of the few studies that used ecologically valid materials designed for independent reading practice and found the comprehension scores of students with learning disabilities were significantly higher for non-illustrated than for illustrated passages 38 . Coldstein and Underwood 39 reviewed different styles of illustrations in reading materials for beginning readers and noted, “Clearly a variety of assumptions have been made by designers of reading scheme, but studies of the processes involved in learning to read have shed very little light on the role of illustration,” (p. 9) 39 . Nearly four decades later, we still know relatively little about the role of illustrations in reading materials for beginning readers and a number of questions remain unresolved.

First, several researchers have suggested that pictures may distract children from printed text 38 , 39 , 40 . Some researchers have further proposed that when text is accompanied by illustrations, working memory resources are devoted to processing pictures; thus, less resources are left for processing written text 24 , 34 . Yet, there is no direct evidence that beginning readers are distracted by illustrations, or that children attend less to the text in the presence of illustrations. Eye-tracking studies of shared story-book reading in pre-reading children suggest that pre-reading children overwhelmingly attend to images and only minimally attend to text 41 , 42 , whereas eye-tracking evidence from studies with older children who are reading-to-learn suggests that by fourth-grade children overwhelmingly attend to text and only minimally to illustrations 37 . However, no prior studies used eye tracking to examine the effect of illustrations on reading performance in beginning readers. Beginning readers are in a transition period: during primary school years children still experience social reading contexts such as a shared book reading with a teacher or caregiver, but beginning readers are also increasingly expected to read independently. The present work is aimed at understanding how best to support young readers’ during this transition period as they become independent fluent readers. Second, most prior studies focused on decoding—children’s ability to read words quickly and accurately—but few studies examined the effects of illustrations on reading comprehension. It is possible the detrimental effect of illustrations on decoding may be offset by the beneficial effects of illustrations on reading comprehension 36 . Indeed, instructing children to refer to illustrations to aid comprehension as well as decoding is a common instructional strategy in elementary school 40 , 43 . Alternatively, it is possible that by interfering with decoding, illustrations may also interfere with reading comprehension, as Torcasio and Sweller 34 suggested, and as Rose 38 observed in students with learning disabilities 34 , 38 . Lastly, prior research has investigated illustrations in materials for beginning readers in a binary fashion: illustrations were either present or absent. Perhaps the putative negative effects of illustrations on children’s reading performance can be minimized simply by removing extraneous illustrations, rather than by completely removing illustrations from beginning reader books.

This study aimed to address the limitations above. We examined the effects of extraneous illustrations on attention and reading comprehension in 1st- and 2nd-grade students ( n  = 60) using a commercially available book designed for independent reading practice in 1st grade. Half of the book was presented to children in a commercially available “Standard” condition, and half of the book was presented to children in a “Streamlined” condition in which extraneous illustrations were removed (schematic depiction of reading materials in each condition is shown in Fig. 1 ). The order of conditions was counterbalanced across participants and presented to children on a computer screen while an SMI RED250 mobile eye tracker recorded children’s eye gaze patterns. The primary measures of children’s attention during reading were gaze shifts away from text and fixations to extraneous details. A calibration study with adult fluent readers was conducted to methodically determine which illustrations were extraneous (see Method). Comprehension questions provided by the book publisher were administered to assess reading comprehension and were linked to the content presented on specific pages, making it possible to clearly distinguish events from the first or second half of the book (see “Methods” for sample questions). To control for reading level, reading accuracy was assessed using a Running Record 44 , which measures the percentage of words children decode accurately aloud. An independent assessment of reading proficiency—Word Recognition in Isolation test (WRI) 45 —was also administered.

Schematic depiction of a book page in the Standard condition (top) in which the illustrations include extraneous details; the Streamlined condition (middle) in which the extraneous details were removed and only illustrations relevant to the text were retained; and the Featureless Background condition (bottom) in which the illustrations were identical to the Standard condition, however, the text was placed on a plain featureless background. Note that these are original images hand-drawn and developed by the first author of the study to schematically represent the differences among conditions. Actual images of the reading materials used in the study are not reproduced here to avoid copyright infringement. Examples of the reading materials and sample gaze patterns of children reading in each condition can be viewed in the Open Science Framework repository for the study: https://osf.io/frgw8/?view_only=42259f9134024b54bd5adae2da7f9c2a .

Based on the theoretical framework of attention as a competitive process 7 , 8 , 9 , we expected that if text and illustrations compete for children’s attention, there should be a higher rate of gaze shifts away from the text in the Standard condition compared to the Streamlined condition. In line with the prediction of the Cognitive Load Theory 30 , 34 , we hypothesized that encoding extraneous illustrations in the Standard condition would negatively affect children’s reading comprehension compared to the Streamlined condition. To rule out the possibility the observed effects in the Streamlined condition stemmed from enhancing text saliency, we conducted a follow-up control experiment with another sample of 1 st and 2nd-grade students ( n  = 60) implementing a Featureless Background condition (see Fig. 1 for a schematic depiction of reading materials in this condition).

Reading level

Children were beginning readers as evidenced by their performance on the WRI, the independent measure of children’s reading proficiency ( M  = 68.87, SD = 18.89). The selected book was an appropriate difficulty level for independent reading based on children’s mean performance on the Running Record ( M  = 96.56%; SD = 4.15%). The manipulation to the book condition did not influence children’s decoding accuracy (Standard: M  = 95.79%; SD = 4.13%; Streamlined: M  = 95.78%; SD = 4.16%), paired-sample t (59) = 0.89, p  = 0.38; Cohen’s d  = 0.12.

Eye-tracking results

Eye-tracking data from 1 participant were not included in the analyses due to a technical failure. There were no significant differences in total looking duration at the book pages in the Standard condition ( M  = 42,339 ms; SD = 30,459 ms) compared to the Streamlined condition ( M  = 40,325 ms; SD = 31,856 ms), paired-sample t (58) = 1.09, p  = 0.28; Cohen’s d  = 0.14.

Gaze shifts

First, to examine the effect of removing extraneous illustrations on attention, we assessed how frequently children looked away from the text in each book condition. To assess possible order effects and grade differences, we conducted a linear mixed-effects model (LMM) on gaze shifts away from the text, with book condition, grade, and order modeled as fixed effects and subject as a random effect. Table 1 shows the estimations of fixed effects and the corresponding 95% confidence intervals (CI). There was a main effect of book condition, F (1, 58) = 40.26; p  < 0.0005; Cohen’s d  = 0.83. The fixed intercept value of 4.54 represents the mean gaze shifts away from the text while reading in the Streamlined condition. The intercept for gaze shifts away from the text in the Standard condition is 4.54 + 12.31 = 16.85, and this is significantly higher than the mean gaze shifts away from the text while reading in the Streamlined condition ( t  = 6.35, p  < 0.0005, 95% CI for the difference is 8.42 to 16.19 higher). Follow-up pairwise comparisons after Bonferroni corrections revealed that on average, children looked away from the text 12.31 (SE = 1.94) more times per page in the Standard condition compared to the Streamlined condition. There was one extreme outlier (i.e., average gaze shifts that deviated >3 SD away from the group mean) in the Standard condition. With the removal of this outlier, there was still evidence of a main effect of book condition on gaze shifts away from the text, F  = 39.53; p  < 0.0005; Cohen’s d  = 0.89. There was no significant main effect of grade with alpha set at 0.05, F (1, 56) = 3.78, p  = 0.057; Cohen’s d  = 0.42. However, the effect size is medium, indicating a trend of first-grade children looking away from the text while reading more than second-grade children: the intercept for gaze shifts away from the text for first-grade children is 4.54 + 6.99 = 11.53, and this is moderately higher than the mean gaze shifts away from the text for second-grade children ( t  = 1.95, p  = 0.057, 95% CI for the difference is −0.21 to 14.21 higher). There was no main effect of order, F (1, 56) = 1.91, p  = 0.173; Cohen’s d  = 0.29, and no significant interactions between any of these factors and gaze shifts away from the text (all p s > 0.17; see Table S5 in the online Supplementary Material for LMM analysis with the interaction terms). Taken together, these results support the prediction that children look away from the text at a higher rate while reading the story in the Standard condition than in the Streamlined condition (see Fig. 2 for paired box plot).

Paired box plot of mean gaze shifts away from the text in the Standard and Streamlined book conditions. Children looked away from the text more frequently while reading in the Standard condition compared to the Streamlined condition. This pattern was observed for both first and second-grade children; although a trend was observed in which first-grade children (teal markers) looked away from the text more than second-grade children (pink markers). Boxplot center line identifies the median, the upper whiskers extend from the 75th percentile to the 75th percentile + 1.5 interquartile range, the lower whiskers extend from the 25th percentile to the 25th–1.5 interquartile range, *** p  < 0.001. Note: One extreme outlier (gaze shift value of 134.33 in the Standard condition) is not displayed.

Reading comprehension

To investigate our primary hypothesis—that removing extraneous details would improve reading comprehension—we assessed how well children could answer questions related to the content of the story they read in each book condition. To assess possible order effects and grade differences, we conducted a LMM on reading comprehension, with book condition, grade, and order modeled as fixed effects and subject as a random effect. Table 1 shows the estimations of fixed effects and the corresponding 95% CIs. There was a main effect of book condition, F (1, 59) = 65.80; p  < 0.0005; Cohen’s d  = 1.05. The fixed intercept value of 79.69 represents the mean comprehension scores (in %) for the Streamlined condition. The intercept for comprehension scores in the Standard Condition is 79.69−32.86 = 46.83, and this is significantly lower than comprehension scores in the Streamlined condition ( t  = −8.11, p  < 0.0005, 95% CI for the difference is 24.75–40.96% lower). Follow-up pairwise comparisons after Bonferroni corrections revealed that on average, children scored 32.86% ( SE  = 4.05) higher on the comprehension assessment in the Streamlined condition compared to the Standard condition. There was one outlier with a comprehension score of 28.57% in the Streamlined condition. With the removal of this outlier, there was still evidence of a main effect of book condition on comprehension, F  = 69.91; p  < 0.0005; Cohen’s d  = 1.05. There was no main effect of order, F (1, 57) = 1.16, p  = 0.287; Cohen’s d  = 0.16, or grade, F (1, 57) = 0.71, p  = 0.402; Cohen’s d  = 0.12, and no significant interactions between any of these factors and comprehension (all p s > 0.28; see Table S5 in the online Supplementary Material for LMM analysis with the interaction terms). These findings support the prediction that reading comprehension scores would be higher in the Streamlined condition than in the Standard condition (see Fig. 3 for paired box plot).

Paired box plots of reading comprehension scores (%) in the Standard and Streamlined conditions. Reading comprehension scores were higher in the Streamlined condition compared to the Standard condition. Boxplot center line identifies the median, the upper whiskers extend from the 75th percentile to the 75th percentile + 1.5 interquartile range, the lower whiskers extend from the 25th percentile to the 25th–1.5 interquartile range, *** p  < 0.001. Data points were jittered in R by 0.03 to prevent overplotting (Team 67 ). Note: One outlier (score of 28.57% in the Streamlined condition) is not displayed.

Association between eye gaze patterns and reading comprehension

We then examined the association between mean gaze shifts away from the text and fixations to extraneous details while reading and reading comprehension performance. It is plausible children looked away from the text more in the Standard condition compared to the Streamlined condition because children may attempt to use the illustrations as a strategy to help determine the meaning of unknown words. However, increased gaze shifts away from the text, r (57) = −0.62, 95% CI [−0.75, −0.43], p  < 0.0005, and higher fixations to extraneous details r (57) = −0.42, 95% CI [−0.61, −0.18], p  < 0.0005, were negatively associated with children’s comprehension scores in the Standard condition (see Fig. 4 ). In other words, the associations between reading comprehension scores with children’s eye gaze patterns indicate that not only are gaze shifts away from the text negatively associated with children’s reading comprehension performance, but children who often fixate on extraneous illustrations while reading have lower reading comprehension scores.

Scatterplots of correlations between reading comprehension scores (% correct) and eye gaze patterns in the Standard condition. Higher gaze shifts away from the text (left) and fixations to extraneous details (right) were both negatively associated with reading comprehension scores. Shaded regions represent 95% confidence interval of the prediction line.

Next, we investigated whether reading in the Streamlined condition is especially useful for children with less developed attention regulation. For this analysis, a comprehension difference score for each child was calculated by subtracting the Standard condition comprehension score from the Streamlined condition score, such that higher and positive difference scores indexed greater gains in reading comprehension. Comprehension difference scores ranged from −57.14 to 85.71%, with a mean of 32.86% (SD = 31.38%). Higher gaze shifts away from the text r (57) = 0.63, 95% CI [0.45, 0.80], p  < 0.0001 and higher fixations to extraneous illustrations, r (57) = 0.61, 95% CI [0.42, 0.75], p  < 0.0005 were positively associated with how much children’s comprehension improved when reading in the Streamlined condition (see Fig. 5 ). Specifically, children who were more prone to look away from the text and who tended to fixate on extraneous illustrations while reading showed greater gains in comprehension when reading in the Streamlined condition.

Scatterplots of the correlations between reading comprehension difference scores (Streamlined Reading Comprehension Score–Standard Comprehension Score) and eye gaze patterns. Higher gaze shifts away from the text (left) and fixations to extraneous details (right) were both positively associated with reading comprehension difference scores (i.e., extent to which children’s reading comprehension improved in the Streamlined condition) suggesting that children who tended to look away from the text or tended to fixate on extraneous illustration details in the Standard condition, showed greater gains in comprehension when extraneous details were removed in the Streamlined condition. Shaded regions represent 95% confidence interval of the prediction line.

To examine the extent to which fixations to extraneous details uniquely predicted how much children’s comprehension improved reading in the Streamlined condition, a multiple regression analysis was conducted that included extraneous illustration fixations, relevant illustration fixations, and WRI reading proficiency scores as predictors of children’s comprehension difference scores (see Table 2 ). The additive model accounted for 42.93% of the variability in comprehension difference scores ( F  = 13.79, df  = 3, 55, p  < 0.0001). The only significant predictor of comprehension difference scores was fixations to extraneous details ( β  = 0.95, t  = 2.78, p  = 0.007, 95% CI [0.27, 1.63]).

Follow-up control experiment

We conducted a follow-up experiment with another sample of 1st and 2nd-grade students ( n  = 60) to examine the possibility that the results above may be due to making the text more discriminable against the background, rather than due to the removal of extraneous illustrations. Towards this goal, we created a new condition: a Featureless Background condition, in which the text was placed on a white background but no other changes were made to the illustrations (see Fig. 1 ). We then compared children’s gaze shifts and reading comprehension in the Standard condition to the Featureless Background condition, using the same within-subjects design and procedure as Experiment 1 (see “Methods”). The results of the control experiment revealed a main effect of grade on gaze shifts away from the text, F (1, 57) = 8.44; p  = 0.005; Cohen’s d  = 0.71. The fixed intercept value of 16.95 represents the mean gaze shifts away from the text while reading in the Featureless Background condition. The intercept for gaze shifts away from the text for first-grade children is 16.95 + 11.15 = 28.10, and this is significantly higher than the mean gaze shifts away from the text for second-grade children ( t  = 2.91, p  = 0.005, 95% CI for the difference is 3.47–18.84 higher). These findings reproduce a similar trend from Experiment 1 of first-grade children looking away from the text more frequently than second-grade children. There was no main effect of book condition (Cohen’s d  = 0.07) nor order (Cohen’s d  = 0.03) on mean gaze shifts away from text and reading comprehension scores (all F s < 1.4, all p s > 0.24), ruling out the possibility that the observed effects in the Streamlined condition stemmed from enhancing text salience (see Table S7 and Table S8 in the online Supplementary Material for LMM analyses with and without the interaction terms). The control experiment replicated the following findings of the main experiment: lower reading comprehension scores were associated with higher tendency to look away from the text ( r (58) = −0.51, 95% CI [−0.67, −0.30], p  < 0.0005) and higher fixations to extraneous details ( r (58) = −0.48, 95% CI [−0.65, −0.26], p  < 0.0005). The results of the control experiment provide evidence that the effects of the Streamlined condition were not solely attributed to making the text more discriminable against the background. Results of the control experiment also replicate findings of the main experiment of the negative association between children’s eye-gaze patterns and reading comprehension. Full details of the implementation, method, and results from the control experiment are reported in the Supplementary Materials (pp. 10–19).

The reported results provide evidence that excluding extraneous illustrations from reading materials for beginning readers can enhance children’s attention to the text and improve reading comprehension. These findings are strengthened further by the results of the follow-up control experiment, which provided evidence that the benefits of removing extraneous illustrations for attention and reading comprehension were unlikely to be driven by greater text discriminability. Nearly all children exhibited fewer gaze shifts away from the text and obtained higher comprehension scores when reading in the Streamlined condition compared to the commercially available Standard condition. Furthermore, children who frequently shifted their gaze away from the text and fixated on extraneous details while reading in the Standard condition (presumably, due to less developed attentional control) exhibited the greatest gains in comprehension from reading in the Streamlined condition. Importantly, the regression model revealed that the associations between children’s eye-gaze patterns and comprehension were not entirely due to variance shared with overall reading proficiency or the ability to match words with referents: fixations to extraneous illustrations was the only significant predictor of gains in reading comprehension, while reading proficiency (WRI scores) and fixations to relevant illustrations were not.

In the Standard condition, children made frequent gaze shifts away from the text to the illustrations. Frequent switching between two different tasks—reading the text to understand the story on one hand and exploring engaging illustrations on the other hand—might place too much extraneous load on young children’s working memory resulting in decreased reading comprehension 46 . Because illustrations matched the story text in the Streamlined condition (i.e., illustrations reinforced the text without extraneous load), children did not have an opportunity to encode illustration details that were irrelevant to the text. Instead, the relevant illustrations may have helped children integrate nonverbal information and text to develop a better representation of the story (for relevant findings with proficient readers see refs. 47 , 48 ). Future research is needed to test this possibility by comparing beginning readers’ comprehension in a book that contains only relevant illustrations and no illustrations, a possibility we are currently exploring.

The inclusion of only relevant illustrations may be particularly beneficial for children who frequently look away from the text because these children’s ability to selectively attend to relevant information while suppressing irrelevant, extraneous information is less efficient. Prior findings suggest that children’s attentional control and ability to focus in preschool and first grade are significant predictors of reading achievement years later in fourth grade and even into adulthood at age 21 49 , 50 . These results point to the importance of taking attentional control—a foundational component linked to school readiness and reading achievement—into account when designing educational materials.

One limitation to this study is that the reading comprehension assessment primarily focused on the recall of key story events, and as such assessed both understanding and memory of the story. In future research, it would be important to incorporate multiple assessments of comprehension, including assessments that have lower memory demands. Another limitation is that this study did not include an independent measure of attention. Future studies should include independent measures of attention to examine whether modifying aspects of the book design is generally beneficial for beginning readers or whether this instructional support is particularly promising for specific populations of children.

In summary, the results of this study show that extraneous illustrations details increase gaze shifts away from text and decrease reading comprehension in beginning readers. Furthermore, higher fixations to extraneous illustrations during reading were associated with lower reading comprehension scores. It is important to note that we are not advocating for the removal of illustrations from books, but rather encouraging consideration of whether and how the design of instructional reading materials for beginning readers can be optimized by taking into account children’s developing attention regulation skills. In addition, the motivational and engaging aspects of illustrations in books for beginning readers should not be ignored: it is well-known that children like pictures. Alice, the beloved character of Charles Dodgson’s story Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 51 , famously wondered “what is the use of a book … without pictures?” In the present study the effect of removing extraneous illustrations on children’s engagement was not measured due to the nature of the within-subject design. However, children’s total looking duration and looking duration to pictures in the Streamlined and Standard conditions were approximately equal. Nevertheless, it remains to be explored in future research, whether removing extraneous illustration details may affect children’s motivation.

The nature of illustrations that accompany text may have important implications for attention and learning not just for students who are reading-to-learn but also for children who are learning-to-read. The findings presented here highlight the opportunity to improve the design of educational materials for beginning readers by limiting extraneous illustrations in order to better support children’s developing attentional regulation and reading comprehension. These findings suggest that enhancements to instructional reading materials should serve a clear purpose to engage the child with the story content while ensuring they do not interfere with performance and learning. The consideration of the potential costs of adding extraneous illustrations may be especially important for children with less developed attention regulation.

Participants

Sixty-six participants were recruited; however, only children who exhibited a minimum level of decoding proficiency on an independent measure of reading fluency (i.e., passed Level 1 on the Word Recognition in Isolation measure described below) continued with the study. Children who did not show the minimum level of reading proficiency to continue in the study, read a simpler book with the experimenter. The final sample consisted of 60 children ( M age  = 7.56 years, SD = 7 months; 27 females, 24 males, and 9 children whose sex was not reported) in Grade 1 ( n  = 30) and Grade 2 ( n  = 30). See Table S2 in the online Supplementary Material for mean age and sex of participants by grade level. Primary school children were targeted for the present study as young children were hypothesized to be particularly susceptible to attentional competition between text and engaging illustrations due to the combination of their immature attention regulation system and developing decoding skills. Participants were recruited from schools in and around a Mid-Atlantic city in the United States. The race and ethnicity information for the sample reported by the parents was as follows: 41.7% White, 40.0% African American or Black, 10.0% Multi-Racial, 1.7% reported as Other, and 6.7% unreported. The experimental protocol was approved by the Carnegie Mellon University Institutional Review Board (protocol STUDY2017_00000301). Signed consent was obtained from the parents of participants. Children were tested individually by hypothesis-blind trained research assistants and children were given a small prize for their participation (e.g., a bouncy ball or marble maze toy).

Design, materials, and procedure

To maintain a high level of ecological validity, children read a commercially available book entitled Good Job Dennis from the “Hooked on Phonics®” curriculum for first grade (“Hooked on Phonics®” is a trademark of Sandviks HOP, Inc. This publication is not sponsored or endorsed by Sandviks HOP, Inc.). Detailed descriptions of the materials (including minor modifications to the book to equate the number of words across conditions), instructions, and procedure are provided in the Supplementary Materials . A brief overview is provided below. See Table S4 and Table S6 in the Online Supplementary Material for descriptive statistics on the reading and eye-tracking outcome measures by book condition.

Preliminary study: the classification of extraneous illustration details

A calibration study with adults ( n  = 15) was conducted to determine which illustrations were relevant and which were extraneous. Participants were presented with the book in the Standard layout and were given instructions to outline the details in the illustrations they believed were relevant to the story. The illustration details that participants reached over 90% agreement on were considered relevant illustrations and retained in the Streamlined condition, whereas the other illustration details were deemed extraneous illustrations and excluded.

The book condition was manipulated within-subjects: half of the book was presented to children in a commercially available “Standard” condition, and in the other half of the book the extraneous illustrations were removed (“Streamlined” condition). Minor modifications were made to the text to ensure each half of the book matched in length (see the online Supplementary Material for detailed explanation). The final version of the book used in this study contained a total of 12 pages (six double-page spreads), resulting in 6 pages (three double-page spreads) per condition. The average number of words per double-page spread was 43.0 in the first half of the book and 42.3 in the second half of the book. The book was presented on a laptop computer. Reading was self-paced, and participants advanced to the next screen by pressing a button on the keyboard. After reading the story, children’s reading comprehension was assessed. Note that children were informed that they would be asked a few questions about the story. Each testing session was videotaped with a Logitech C920 HD Pro Webcam. Testing sessions mimicked a guided-reading instructional session that children typically encounter when reading with a teacher. Thus, the experimenter scaffolded children’s decoding. For instance, when children made a decoding error or skipped a word, the experimenter prompted the child to try again and when necessary helped the child sound out the word. All prompts were recorded. These scaffolds were implemented to align with current literacy instruction practices and served to minimize children’s frustration.

Eye-tracking measures

An SMI RED250 mobile eye tracker 52 was used to measure children’s eye movements while reading. On each page of the book, we created areas of interest (AOIs) for text, illustrations, and white space. Relevant illustration AOIs were designated as the illustration details retained for the Streamlined condition (mean area covered by relevant illustrations was M  = 686,807 pixels), while extraneous illustration AOIs were designated as the details omitted in the Streamlined condition (mean area covered by extraneous illustrations was M  = 622,332 pixels; a schematic depiction of this classification is shown in Fig. 6 ; see Table S1 in the online Supplementary Material for total pixels per page, by AOI). SMI BeGaze Eyetracking Analysis Software was then used to calculate average gaze shifts away from the text, average fixations to extraneous illustrations, and average fixations to relevant illustrations.

Schematic depiction of the classification of areas of interest (AOIs) used for eye gaze pattern analysis. We used three AOI categories: Relevant Illustration AOIs (in green)—illustrations reinforcing the text; Extraneous Illustration AOIs (in red)—illustration details not pertinent to the text; and Text AOIs (in blue). Note that this is an original image hand-drawn and developed by the first author of the study to schematically depict the AOI classifications used in this study. Actual images of the reading materials used in the study are not reproduced here to avoid copyright infringement. Examples of the AOIs drawn on the materials used in the study can be viewed in the Open Science Framework repository for the study: https://osf.io/frgw8/?view_only=42259f9134024b54bd5adae2da7f9c2a .

Word recognition in isolation test (WRI)

The WRI—adapted from Morris 45 —was administered to children prior to reading the story. The WRI measures children’s ability to recognize and decode individual words. The measure consists of a series of word lists that are graded in difficulty. Scores were calculated as the number of words read accurately in 90 s out of 100 total possible words. The WRI has been shown to be a strong predictor of contextual and oral reading levels 53 , 54 .

Reading accuracy

While children read the book aloud, the experimenter manually recorded the child’s decoding accuracy for each word in the story using a running record 44 . The experimenter also recorded any prompts that were administered. For each condition, decoding accuracy was calculated as the percentage of correct responses.

Reading comprehension is a complex process that has been notoriously challenging to assess 55 , 56 . Asking open-ended recall questions about a story (e.g., asking individuals to recall the characters, settings, character goals and solutions from the narrative) is one of the most common approaches to reading comprehension assessments with young children 57 , 58 , 59 . Furthermore, early childhood educators also use open-ended recall questions as the primary instructional strategy for reading comprehension in school settings 60 . One limitation of this assessment and similar measures is that they assess both children’s understanding of the events described in the text and their memory of the events; nevertheless, open-ended recall questions are considered one of the most appropriate assessments of reading comprehension with elementary school children 57 . Following this common practice, we chose to assess children’s reading comprehension using the open-ended questions provided by the book publisher labeled for educators, parents, and children as “reading comprehension questions.” Although these questions probe both children’s understanding and memory of the story, for brevity and following the convention in the literature, we refer to this outcome measure as a ‘reading comprehension’ assessment in this manuscript.

The commercially available book used in this study incorporated six suggested questions to assess children’s reading comprehension. To preserve ecological validity, we used the comprehension questions suggested by the publisher with minor modifications that ensured the questions were linked to the content presented on specific pages, making it possible to clearly distinguish events from the first or second half of the book (see the online Supplementary Material for the comprehension assessment modifications). There were three questions for each half of the book (two 2-point questions, and one 3-point question). A total of 14 points were possible, 7 points per condition. For example, in the first half of the book the job of the main character, Dennis, is described; these story details are not part of the content in the second half of the book. For the 2-point story question, children were asked, “What is Dennis’ job?” Children received full credit if they identified that Dennis directs traffic and helps children cross the street, 1 point for a partial answer (e.g., he helps children), and 0 points if they failed to recall Dennis’ job or provided an incorrect response. In the second half of the book, various animals escape from a pet shop including cats, dogs, birds, rabbits, and frogs; these story details are not part of the content in the first half of the book. For the 3-point question, children were asked, “What animals get out of the pet shop?” Children received full credit if they correctly identified all of the animals that escaped, 2 points if they identified at least 3 animals, 1 point if they identified only 2 animals, and 0 points if they failed to recall the animals that escaped or provided an incorrect response. Reading comprehension was measured as the percentage of correct responses (out of 7 possible points in each condition). The story questions were scored twice by hypothesis-blind research assistants who were also blind to the participants’ condition assignment. Inter-rater reliability using Cohen’s kappa 61 was 0.85, indicating substantial coder consistency.

Children were also asked to orally recount the story as an additional measure of reading comprehension. The retelling measure was administered before the comprehension questions. Overall, children struggled with retelling the story, consistent with findings reported in prior literature suggesting that even on-grade readers tend to retell few main ideas and text details without question prompts 62 . Due to concerns about the overall low level of performance on the retelling measure, we report the details on the retelling measure administration, scoring, and results in the Supplementary Materials (pp. 20–22).

Statistical analyses

A LMM was applied with maximum likelihood method to determine the main effects of condition (Standard or Streamlined), grade, and condition order on gaze shifts away from the text and comprehension scores. A random intercept model was applied. The effect of condition was treated as a repeated measure with “Unstructured” as the repeated covariance type. Neither the condition × grade interaction nor the condition × order interaction was found to be significant during the model selection process. Therefore, no interaction terms were included in the final LMM analyses 63 . Follow-up pairwise comparison with Bonferroni confidence interval adjustment was used to compare mean gaze shifts away from the text and comprehension scores between conditions. Differences of means and 95% CIs were determined using the LMMs. Effect sizes were determined using Cohen’s d and calculated using mean differences from the mixed model, the standard deviation of the means, and the correlation between the two conditions for the within-subjects variables:

and calculated using mean differences from the mixed model, the standard deviation of the means, and the sample sizes for the between-subjects variables 64 :

Based on the Fisher r-to-z transformation, 95% CIs for Pearson Correlation Coefficients were calculated utilizing the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient observed within the sample and the number of paired observations of the sample 65 . Alpha was set at 0.05 for all statistical tests. All tests for these and other analyses were two-tailed. All statistical analyses were conducted in IBM SPSS Statistics V26.

Reporting summary

Further information on experimental design is available in the Nature Research Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

The data reported and sample videos of children’s eye gaze patterns during reading are accessible in the Open Science Framework repository 66 , https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/FRGW8 , https://osf.io/frgw8/?view_only=42259f9134024b54bd5adae2da7f9c2a .

Code availability

We used SPSS (v.26) to perform the analyses. The scripts used to analyze these data can be found in the Open Science Framework repository 66 , https://osf.io/frgw8/?view_only=42259f9134024b54bd5adae2da7f9c2a .

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by a National Science Foundation award (BCS-1730060) to A.V.F and K.E.G. and by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through grant R305B150008 to Carnegie Mellon University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education. We thank Kristen Boyle, Melissa Pocsai, and Oceann Stanley for assistance with data collection; Xavier Artache, Marie Shaw, Emery Noll, and Kristy Zhang for assistance with the systematic design of the storybook pages and AOIs; Priscilla Medor, Amy Lin, Rebeka Almasi, Hyunji Do, Graciela Garcia, Sara Jahanian, Elaine (Zhuyi) Xu, Smriti Chauhan, Isabel Rozario, and Matt King for assistance with coding data; and Dr. Howard Seltman, Junyi Zhang, Rebecca Gu, and Dejia Su for assisting with the eye-tracking data preprocessing and analyses; and Maanasi Bulusu with assistance in the design of the schematic illustrations. We are grateful to the children, parents, and educators who made this project possible.

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Eng, C.M., Godwin, K.E. & Fisher, A.V. Keep it simple: streamlining book illustrations improves attention and comprehension in beginning readers. npj Sci. Learn. 5 , 14 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-020-00073-5

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The Role of Book Features in Young Children's Transfer of Information from Picture Books to Real-World Contexts

Affiliations.

• 1 Counselling and Psychology in Education, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD, United States.
• 2 Department of Applied Psychology and Human Development, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
• PMID: 29467690
• PMCID: PMC5807901
• DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00050

Picture books are an important source of new language, concepts, and lessons for young children. A large body of research has documented the nature of parent-child interactions during shared book reading. A new body of research has begun to investigate the features of picture books that support children's learning and transfer of that information to the real world. In this paper, we discuss how children's symbolic development, analogical reasoning, and reasoning about fantasy may constrain their ability to take away content information from picture books. We then review the nascent body of findings that has focused on the impact of picture book features on children's learning and transfer of words and letters, science concepts, problem solutions, and morals from picture books. In each domain of learning we discuss how children's development may interact with book features to impact their learning. We conclude that children's ability to learn and transfer content from picture books can be disrupted by some book features and research should directly examine the interaction between children's developing abilities and book characteristics on children's learning.

Keywords: analogical reasoning; fantasy distinction; learning; picture books; symbolic development; transfer.

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Analyzing Creativity in Children’s Picture Books

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• Zeliha Demirci Ünal   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4575-6915 1 ,
• Yeliz Menteşe   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4197-0479 1 &
• Serap Sevimli-Celik   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9072-9289 1  

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The purpose of this study was to examine creativity in children’s books in terms of problem solving, divergent thinking, curiosity, and growth mindset. The study was carried out qualitatively where the researchers analyzed 100 picture books written in or translated into Turkish for children between the ages of three to six years old. Indicated in the findings was that, while problem solving and curiosity were greatly encouraged through the selected books, there was little emphasis placed on divergent thinking and growth mindset in the stories. New understandings and insights were provided through the findings of this study into how problem solving, divergent thinking, curiosity, and growth mindset in books can be encouraged for young readers. Further suggestions and future directions for educators and researchers can also be gleaned from the results of this study.

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by ZDÜ, YM and SS-C. The first draft of the manuscript was written by ZDÜ and YM. Corresponding author commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Zeliha Demirci Ünal is a PhD student and research assistant of Elementary and Early Childhood Education in the College of Education at the Middle East Technical University. Her research interests include social development, curriculum, and multicultural early childhood education.

Yeliz Menteşe  is a PhD student of Elementary and Early Childhood Education in the College of Education at the Middle East Technical University. Her research interests include sustainability, outdoor education, creativity, and play in early childhood.

Serap Sevimli-Celik is an Associate Professor of Elementary and Early Childhood Education in the College of Education at the Middle East Technical University where she teaches courses on Movement Education, Play, and Creativity at the undergraduate level and Embodied Learning at the graduate level. She has written book chapters on active designs and play in early childhood. She has recently written articles on movement education and creativity in early childhood teacher education.

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Ünal, Z.D., Menteşe, Y. & Sevimli-Celik, S. Analyzing Creativity in Children’s Picture Books. Child Lit Educ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-023-09535-x

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April 11, 2013

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The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens

E-readers and tablets are becoming more popular as such technologies improve, but research suggests that reading on paper still boasts unique advantages

By Ferris Jabr

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In a viral YouTube video from October 2011 a one-year-old girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad's touchscreen, shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes she appears to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as though they too were screens. When nothing happens, she pushes against her leg, confirming that her finger works just fine—or so a title card would have us believe. The girl's father, Jean-Louis Constanza , presents "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" as naturalistic observation—a Jane Goodall among the chimps moment—that reveals a generational transition. "Technology codes our minds," he writes in the video's description. "Magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives"—that is, for people who have been interacting with digital technologies from a very early age. Perhaps his daughter really did expect the paper magazines to respond the same way an iPad would. Or maybe she had no expectations at all—maybe she just wanted to touch the magazines. Babies touch everything . Young children who have never seen a tablet like the iPad or an e-reader like the Kindle will still reach out and run their fingers across the pages of a paper book; they will jab at an illustration they like; heck, they will even taste the corner of a book. Today's so-called digital natives still interact with a mix of paper magazines and books, as well as tablets, smartphones and e-readers; using one kind of technology does not preclude them from understanding another. Nevertheless, the video brings into focus an important question: How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read? How reading on screens differs from reading on paper is relevant not just to the youngest among us , but to just about everyone who reads—to anyone who routinely switches between working long hours in front of a computer at the office and leisurely reading paper magazines and books at home; to people who have embraced e-readers for their convenience and portability, but admit that for some reason they still prefer reading on paper; and to those who have already vowed to forgo tree pulp entirely. As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading—but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity of such concerns paper-thin? Since at least the 1980s researchers in many different fields—including psychology, computer engineering, and library and information science—have investigated such questions in more than one hundred published studies. The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s , however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common. In the U.S., e-books currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of all trade book sales. Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments , polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

"There is physicality in reading," says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, "maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms, but know when to use the new." Navigating textual landscapes Understanding how reading on paper is different from reading on screens requires some explanation of how the brain interprets written language. We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the abstract—with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs. As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially regards letters as physical objects because it does not really have another way of understanding them. As Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid , we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision. Some of these repurposed brain regions are specialized for object recognition —they are networks of neurons that help us instantly distinguish an apple from an orange, for example, yet classify both as fruit. Just as we learn that certain features—roundness, a twiggy stem, smooth skin—characterize an apple, we learn to recognize each letter by its particular arrangement of lines, curves and hollow spaces. Some of the earliest forms of writing, such as Sumerian cuneiform , began as characters shaped like the objects they represented —a person's head, an ear of barley, a fish. Some researchers see traces of these origins in modern alphabets: C as crescent moon, S as snake. Especially intricate characters—such as Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji —activate motor regions in the brain involved in forming those characters on paper: The brain literally goes through the motions of writing when reading, even if the hands are empty. Researchers recently discovered that the same thing happens in a milder way when some people read cursive. Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies , people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters. In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there's a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text. In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds. A reader of digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text. As an analogy, imagine if Google Maps allowed people to navigate street by individual street, as well as to teleport to any specific address, but prevented them from zooming out to see a neighborhood, state or country. Although e-readers like the Kindle and tablets like the iPad re-create pagination—sometimes complete with page numbers, headers and illustrations—the screen only displays a single virtual page: it is there and then it is gone. Instead of hiking the trail yourself, the trees, rocks and moss move past you in flashes with no trace of what came before and no way to see what lies ahead. "The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns out to be more important than we realized," says Abigail Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office . "Only when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might visualize where you are in a book." At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension. In a study published in January 2013 Anne Mangen of the University of Stavanger in Norway and her colleagues asked 72 10th-grade students of similar reading ability to study one narrative and one expository text, each about 1,500 words in length. Half the students read the texts on paper and half read them in pdf files on computers with 15-inch liquid-crystal display (LCD) monitors. Afterward, students completed reading-comprehension tests consisting of multiple-choice and short-answer questions, during which they had access to the texts. Students who read the texts on computers performed a little worse than students who read on paper. Based on observations during the study, Mangen thinks that students reading pdf files had a more difficult time finding particular information when referencing the texts. Volunteers on computers could only scroll or click through the pdfs one section at a time, whereas students reading on paper could hold the text in its entirety in their hands and quickly switch between different pages. Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says. Supporting this research, surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control. People report that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier, for example, or quickly scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to have as much control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper however they choose. Because of these preferences—and because getting away from multipurpose screens improves concentration—people consistently say that when they really want to dive into a text, they read it on paper. In a 2011 survey of graduate students at National Taiwan University, the majority reported browsing a few paragraphs online before printing out the whole text for more in-depth reading. A 2008 survey of millennials (people born between 1980 and the early 2000s) at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island concluded that, "when it comes to reading a book, even they prefer good, old-fashioned print". And in a 2003 study conducted at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, nearly 80 percent of 687 surveyed students preferred to read text on paper as opposed to on a screen in order to "understand it with clarity". Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences typically associated with reading—especially tactile experiences—matter to people more than one might assume. Text on a computer, an e-reader and—somewhat ironically—on any touch-screen device is far more intangible than text on paper. Whereas a paper book is made from pages of printed letters fixed in a particular arrangement, the text that appears on a screen is not part of the device's hardware—it is an ephemeral image. When reading a paper book, one can feel the paper and ink and smooth or fold a page with one's fingers; the pages make a distinctive sound when turned; and underlining or highlighting a sentence with ink permanently alters the paper's chemistry. So far, digital texts have not satisfyingly replicated this kind of tactility (although some companies are innovating, at least with keyboards ). Paper books also have an immediately discernible size, shape and weight. We might refer to a hardcover edition of War and Peace as a hefty tome or a paperback Heart of Darkness as a slim volume. In contrast, although a digital text has a length—which is sometimes represented with a scroll or progress bar—it has no obvious shape or thickness. An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough " haptic dissonance " to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books. Exhaustive reading Although many old and recent studies conclude that people understand what they read on paper more thoroughly than what they read on screens, the differences are often small. Some experiments, however, suggest that researchers should look not just at immediate reading comprehension, but also at long-term memory. In a 2003 study Kate Garland of the University of Leicester and her colleagues asked 50 British college students to read study material from an introductory economics course either on a computer monitor or in a spiral-bound booklet. After 20 minutes of reading Garland and her colleagues quizzed the students with multiple-choice questions. Students scored equally well regardless of the medium, but differed in how they remembered the information. Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—which is to recall a piece of information along with contextual details, such as where, when and how one learned it—and knowing something, which is feeling that something is true without remembering how one learned the information. Generally, remembering is a weaker form of memory that is likely to fade unless it is converted into more stable, long-term memory that is "known" from then on. When taking the quiz, volunteers who had read study material on a monitor relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on remembering and knowing. Garland and her colleagues think that students who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching their minds for information from the text, trying to trigger the right memory—they often just knew the answers. Other researchers have suggested that people comprehend less when they read on a screen because screen-based reading is more physically and mentally taxing than reading on paper. E-ink is easy on the eyes because it reflects ambient light just like a paper book, but computer screens, smartphones and tablets like the iPad shine light directly into people's faces. Depending on the model of the device, glare, pixilation and flickers can also tire the eyes. LCDs are certainly gentler on eyes than their predecessor, cathode-ray tubes (CRT), but prolonged reading on glossy self-illuminated screens can cause eyestrain, headaches and blurred vision. Such symptoms are so common among people who read on screens—affecting around 70 percent of people who work long hours in front of computers—that the American Optometric Association officially recognizes computer vision syndrome . Erik Wästlund of Karlstad University in Sweden has conducted some particularly rigorous research on whether paper or screens demand more physical and cognitive resources. In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper. In another set of experiments 82 volunteers completed the READ test on computers, either as a paginated document or as a continuous piece of text. Afterward researchers assessed the students' attention and working memory, which is a collection of mental talents that allow people to temporarily store and manipulate information in their minds. Volunteers had to quickly close a series of pop-up windows, for example, sort virtual cards or remember digits that flashed on a screen. Like many cognitive abilities, working memory is a finite resource that diminishes with exertion. Although people in both groups performed equally well on the READ test, those who had to scroll through the continuous text did not do as well on the attention and working-memory tests. Wästlund thinks that scrolling—which requires a reader to consciously focus on both the text and how they are moving it—drains more mental resources than turning or clicking a page, which are simpler and more automatic gestures. A 2004 study conducted at the University of Central Florida reached similar conclusions. Attitude adjustments An emerging collection of studies emphasizes that in addition to screens possibly taxing people's attention more than paper, people do not always bring as much mental effort to screens in the first place. Subconsciously, many people may think of reading on a computer or tablet as a less serious affair than reading on paper. Based on a detailed 2005 survey of 113 people in northern California, Ziming Liu of San Jose State University concluded that people reading on screens take a lot of shortcuts—they spend more time browsing, scanning and hunting for keywords compared with people reading on paper, and are more likely to read a document once, and only once. When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—strategies such as setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way. In a 2011 experiment at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, college students took multiple-choice exams about expository texts either on computers or on paper. Researchers limited half the volunteers to a meager seven minutes of study time; the other half could review the text for as long as they liked. When under pressure to read quickly, students using computers and paper performed equally well. When managing their own study time, however, volunteers using paper scored about 10 percentage points higher. Presumably, students using paper approached the exam with a more studious frame of mind than their screen-reading peers, and more effectively directed their attention and working memory. Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social interaction than they currently do. Books on the Kindle can only be loaned once , for example. To date, many engineers, designers and user-interface experts have worked hard to make reading on an e-reader or tablet as close to reading on paper as possible. E-ink resembles chemical ink and the simple layout of the Kindle's screen looks like a page in a paperback. Likewise, Apple's iBooks attempts to simulate the overall aesthetic of paper books, including somewhat realistic page-turning. Jaejeung Kim of KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence in South Korea and his colleagues have designed an innovative and unreleased interface that makes iBooks seem primitive. When using their interface, one can see the many individual pages one has read on the left side of the tablet and all the unread pages on the right side, as if holding a paperback in one's hands. A reader can also flip bundles of pages at a time with a flick of a finger. But why, one could ask, are we working so hard to make reading with new technologies like tablets and e-readers so similar to the experience of reading on the very ancient technology that is paper? Why not keep paper and evolve screen-based reading into something else entirely? Screens obviously offer readers experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Moby Dick , but the New York Times , Washington Post , ESPN and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that depend entirely on scrolling and could not appear in print in the same way. Some Web comics and infographics turn scrolling into a strength rather than a weakness. Similarly, Robin Sloan has pioneered the tap essay for mobile devices. The immensely popular interactive Scale of the Universe tool could not have been made on paper in any practical way. New e-publishing companies like Atavist offer tablet readers long-form journalism with embedded interactive graphics, maps, timelines, animations and sound tracks. And some writers are pairing up with computer programmers to produce ever more sophisticated interactive fiction and nonfiction in which one's choices determine what one reads, hears and sees next. When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper and ink may still have the advantage. But text is not the only way to read.

Children's Literature and Librarianship

• UMD Discover Overview
• Using eBooks (Guide)
• Database & Journal Finder
• Citing Tools & Citation Managers
• Literature Review & Research Methods
• Background Info, Encyclopedias, & Handbooks
• Finding Children's Books in the UMD Libraries
• Professional Organizations
• Award Winning Books
• Internet Resources
• Indexes and Abstracts
• Biographical Sources
• Bibliographies & Guides
• Tests and Measurements (Guide)
• Systematic Review (Guide)

Subject Guide

Need Help Now?

Get your research questions answered through chat, email, phone, drop in at the Information desk or make an appointment.

Database Search Techniques

• Intro to Databases
• How to Search

Finding Background Information

• Develop a Search Strategy
• Searching Tips
• Types of Resources
• Criteria for Evaluating Resources

Why Use Databases?

Databases  are subscription resources that bring articles from a variety of magazines and/or journals into one place with a sophisticated search engine. Many of the databases allow you to read the entire article online. All databases that UMD Libraries subscribe to can be accessed through  Database Finder.

Library Databases vs Search Engines

Watch these short video tutorials to learn how to search the databases.

You can also  search multiple databases  at once!

EBSCOhost and ProQuest are platforms that house approximately 60 to 75 databases. In order to get the best search results you should select the databases you need (i.e. if your subject is "education" you would limit your search to education databases) . To do this go to the top of the database homepage and look for the terms  All databases, Change databases, or Choose databases . See examples and video tutorial below.

What if there is no full text?

Don't panic!  You have several options:

• 1st Option: Use journal finder to search for the journal.
• 2nd Option: Request article from another library This tutorial will assist you in using Inter Library Loan to request the article.

Start your research by exploring the following resources: ​

Tips for Organizing Your Research

Visit our  Research Commons' Site  for creative and practical suggestions.

Searching Strategies

Choosing your search topic can be a difficult process - it is important to pick a topic that is not so narrow that little if anything has been written about it, yet it is also important to pick a topic that is not so broad that there is too much information and it is impossible to develop a coherent and focused thesis.

Let's say that ....

Searching techniques  to limit or expand your results

Keywords/synonyms

It is important to realize that if you search a database with a certain word or phrase and you don't retrieve results to your liking, it doesn't mean that there are no other articles in that database on your topic. It may mean that you need to try other related words in your search, such as synonyms. For example, try  automobile  or  auto  instead of  car .

Criteria for evaluating resources:

• How does this resource match up with others you've seen? 
• Do the results seem plausible? 
• Who created it? 
• What are the qualifications of the creator?
• Where is the information hosted? (see Web Domains below)
• Is this written in a ‘professional’ manner?  
• Is it sloppy? 
• What kind of evidence does the creator use to support what they are saying?
• Is this written in an objective, detached way? 
• Is this someone’s personal opinion? 
• Who is the intended audience?
• When was this produced?
• If a website, when was this updated last? 
• How old are the works that are foot-noted/cited?

Some examples:

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  - a reliable source for information from 
• Pet Therapy  - the author is unknown, not updated since 2007

Web Domains

Anyone can create a Web site. It is important to find out  who is  the author and what are the author's  qualifications  or  expertise  in order to determine the credibility and reliability of the information.

Education Databases and Journals

• Core Education Databases
• Supplemental Databases

Open Access Journals

• Middle and High School Resources
• Contemporary Newspapers
• Historical Newspapers
• Legal Resources
• Video Resources

Database Finder  and  Journal Finder  are your portals to research databases and electronic journals.

Databases are subscription resources that bring articles from a variety of magazines and/or journals into one place with a sophisticated search engine.  Many of the databases allow you to read the entire article online. Consult Database Finder for the full list of available  subject databases . Remember also that with EBSCOhost and ProQuest, you can choose from a list of databases and search all of them at once .

Citation Finder   is an additional resource to help find specific articles.

The UM Libraries subscribe to over 300 databases!!!  The ones listed here are most useful education databases where you'll be able to find information on your topics. See the Supplemental Databases tab for a fuller list of related subject databases.

Multi-disciplinary database providing information for nearly every area of academic study. Includes an enormous collection of the most valuable peer-reviewed full text journals, as well as additional journals, magazines, newspapers and books. Multidisciplinary subjects including: social sciences, humanities, education, computer sciences, engineering, physics, chemistry, language & linguistics, arts & literature, medicine, ethnic studies. 1965- present.

• EBSCO eBook Collection A collection of E-texts covering topics specifically chosen by Maryland Academic Libraries. Collection strengths include computer science, business, international relations, education, environmental science, psychology, and civil rights law and history.
• Education Index Retrospective A bibliographic database of more than half a century of indexing from an international range of English-language periodicals. Subjects Covered: Adult Education, Arts, Athletics, Comparative Education, Continuing Education, Distance Learning, Elementary Education, Government Funding, Higher Education, Language Arts, Library Science, Literacy Standards, Multicultural/Ethnic Education, Parent-Teacher Relations, Preschool Education, Religious Education, School Administration, Science & Mathematics, Secondary Education , Special Education, Student Counseling, Teacher Education, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching Methods, Vocational Education.
• Education Source Around 1,800 journals (full-text) and over 550 books and monographs in the field of Education. Access to conference papers and indexing and abstracts from thousands of journals. Book reviews and article citations (roughly 5 million).
• ERIC Provides access to information from over 1000 education and education-related journals as well as a variety of non journal materials, or ERIC documents. All aspects and levels of education. 1966- present. Non-journal documents are available via microfiche; they are also online from 1993-present. The database includes an online thesaurus.
• Library & Information Science Source The definitive resource in the field of library and information science with more than 460 high-impact journals, nearly 30 full-text monographs and thesauri, and indexing for hundreds of journals as well as books, research reports, and proceedings. Subject coverage encompasses librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management, and more.
• MasterFILE Premier Provides abstracts and indexing for 2,650 general periodicals. Full text of articles for nearly 2,000 periodicals, and 5,000 full text Magill Book Reviews. Multidisciplinary subjects including general reference, business, education, health, general science, multi-cultural issues, biography, and travel. 1975- present.
• PsycINFO PsycINFO is the most comprehensive index in psychology and related fields, with more than 1.7 million citations and abstracts of journal articles, book chapters and books, technical reports, and dissertations. Its holdings include material from 1,700 periodicals in over 30 languages. Covering the entire range of psychology disciplines, PsycINFO also includes information about the psychological aspects of related fields such as psychiatry, neuroscience, medicine, sociology, education, linguistics, anthropology, business and law. PsycINFO spans 1887 to the present. PsycINFO has links to the full-text articles in PsycARTICLES and the Psychology and in the Behavioral Sciences Collection (thus the user does not have to search each of these databases separately).

Databases are subscription resources that bring articles from a variety of magazines and/or journals into one place with a sophisticated search engine.  Many of the databases allow you to read the entire article online. Consult Database Finder for the full list of available  subject databases . Remember also that with EBSCOhost and ProQuest,  you can choose from a list of databases and search all of them at once .  Some databases focused on other social science subjects will still have information relevant to education, e.g. a criminal justice database may have valuable articles on the school to prison pipeline. 

The UMD Libraries subscribe to over 300 databases!!!  The ones listed here are additional great resources.

• African American Music Reference A collection of online reference books, biographies, chronologies, sheet music, images, lyrics, liner notes and discographies related to the history of African American music in all its guises: spirituals, jazz, blues, civil rights songs, hip hop and more.
• Children's Core Collection Children's Core Collection provides titles chosen specifically for readers from preschool through grade five. Containing over 30,000 titles, this collection covers all genres.
• Criminal Justice Abstracts Criminal Justice Abstracts, formerly produced by Sage Publications, includes bibliographic records covering essential areas related to criminal justice and criminology. The increasing globalization of criminology is reflected in Criminal Justice Abstracts' coverage of hundreds of journals from around the world. Do not attempt to search on authors by truncating the first name. Last, F? will often result in zero hits. Try searching on Last or Last, First
• Data Planet Includes over 550 source databases from over 90 data providers in 16 subject categories ranging from Criminal Justice and Law Enforcement to Banking, Finance, and Insurance, as well as Education, Agriculture, Labor and Employment, Health and Vital Statistics, and Population and Income.
• Fiction Core Collection Fiction Core Collection features classic and contemporary works and provides titles for a general adult audience. The best authors and their most widely-read works in literary and popular fiction old and new are listed. ISBNs are not part of a searchable field in this database. Do not attempt to search on authors by truncating the first name. Last, F? will often result in zero hits. Try searching on Last or Last, First..
• Gale Virtual Reference Library Gale Virtual Reference Library offers more than 85 reference sources including encyclopedias, almanacs, series, and more. Offering access to more than 300 encyclopedias and selected industry-standard reference series. Including content from SAGE Reference, John Wiley & Sons, Cambridge University Press, Berkshire Publishing Group, Cartographica, Linworth and Gale imprints.
• HathiTrust Digital Library NOTE: Download of full book PDF files may require login with University ID. A shared, growing digital repository of millions of books and periodical volumes scanned from major research libraries, including those digitized by institutional effort and by both Google and the Internet Archive. Offers full-text searching and advanced bibliographic search capabilities (such as author, title, publisher, language, etc.), and full PDF downloading of works in the public domain. One feature includes the ability to select and place items from the database into a tailor made collection that may be kept private to the user or shared publicly with others. Items that are saved to collections can be searched independently of the rest of the repository, allowing users to perform focused searches on subsets of HathiTrust materials.
• MAS Ultra School Edition This database contians full text for nearly 500 popular high school magazines. MAS Ultra also provides more than 350 full text reference books, 84,774 biographies, 100, 544 primary source documents and an image collection of 235, 186 photos, maps and flags. Updated daily. ISBNs are not part of a searchable field in this database. Do not attempt to search on authors by truncating the first name. Last, F? will often result in zero hits. Try searching on Last or Last, First
• Primary Search Primary Search contains full text for more than 50 popular, elementary school magazines. All full text articles are assigned a reading level indicator (Lexiles). Full text is also available for over 100 student pamphlets. Additionally, Primary Search includes the Encyclopedia of Animals, and features the Funk + Wagnall's New Encyclopedia, which provides students with easy-to-read encyclopedic entries written specifically for kids. This database also provides the American Heritage Children's Dictionary, 3rd Edition from Houghton Mifflin, and an Image Collection of 91,000 photos, maps and flags. ISBNs are not part of a searchable field in this database.
• Professional Development Collection The database provides a highly specialized collection of electronic information especially for professional educators. This collection offers information on everything from children's health and development to cutting-edge pedagogical theory and practice. This database contains author names with and without full first names. To find all authors with the last name 'Smith' and the first name 'Richard', you may want to search on 'Smith, Richard' OR 'Smith, R' in the Author field.
• Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection The Psychology & Behavioral Sciences Collection is a comprehensive database with nearly 470 full text titles. This database covers information concerning topics in emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry + psychology, mental processes, anthropology, and observational and experimental methods.
• Sage Business Cases Digital collection of over 4,850 interdisciplinary business cases from over 120 countries. Includes subjects such as entrepreneurship, accounting, healthcare management, leadership, social enterprise, and more.
• Sage Knowledge Includes an expansive range of SAGE eBook and eReference content, including scholarly monographs, reference works, handbooks, series, professional development titles.
• Sage Reference Collection Online versions of published reference works from SAGE. A great place to begin your research.
• Sage Research Methods Designed to teach research methods, design research projects, understand or identify new methods , conduct research, and write up findings. Includes collection of case studies, teaching datasets, and video to offer real world applications and hands-on practice for hundreds of qualitative and quantitate research methods.
• Sage Skills: Business Covers over 850 topics across five modules: Data Analytics, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Organizational Communication, and Professionalism. Includes interactive self-assessments, virtual scenarios, downloadable data, and expert insights.
• Sage Skills: Student Success Interactive digital resource featuring the work of a diverse set of academic experts to help undergraduates build confidence and gain essential skillsets for academic and personal success. Includes videos, self-assessment, audio summaries, and virtual scenarios.
• Sage Video Streaming video content in such areas as Business and Management, Counseling and Psychotherapy, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Education, Media, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. All videos are fully citable with searchable transcripts, custom clip creation and embedding. Videos include Documentaries, Films, Case studies, Tutorials, Interviews, and more.
• Teacher's Reference Center The Teacher Reference Center provides indexing and abstracts for over 280 of the most popular teacher and administrator trade journals to assist professional educators.

In contrast to the databases and journals that the UMD libraries subscribe to, there are many academic journals who offer the full text of all or some articles for free. This pages has a few key open access journals in education. For a more comprehensive directory of open access journals visit the  Directory of Open Access Journals , which provides free, full text and scholarly journals.

• Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education  (CITE Journal)
• Current Issues in Comparative Education  (CICE)
• Early Childhood Research & Practice  (ECRP)
• Education Policy Analysis Archives 
• Higher Education in Review
• Journal of Curriculum and Instruction

Sources on Middle/High School Education

Database Finder  and  Journal Finder  are your portals to research databases and electronic journals. Consult Database Finder for the full list of available  subject databases .

Citation Finder   is an additional resource to help find specific articles

Databases are subscription resources that bring articles from a variety of magazines and/or journals into one place with a sophisticated search engine.  Many of the databases allow you to read the entire article online. The UMD Libraries subscribe to over 300 databases!!!  The ones listed on this page are excellent for middle and high school resources.

• Middle and Junior High Core Collection Middle and Junior High Core Collection is ideal for libraries serving readers in grades five through nine. This collection contains over 19,000 entries for nonfiction and fiction works recommended for children and adolescents. more... less... ISBNs are not part of a searchable field in this database. Do not attempt to search on authors by truncating the first name. Last, F? will often result in zero hits. Try searching on Last or Last, First
• Senior High Core Collection Senior High Core Collection is a selective list of fiction and non-fiction titles recommended for high school students (grades 9 through 12), along with review sources and other professional aids for librarians and school media specialists. ISBNs are not part of a searchable field in this database. Do not attempt to search on authors by truncating the first name. Last, F? will often result in zero hits. Try searching on Last or Last, First

Research Guides for Specific Subjects

• Mathematics Research Guide  
• Physics Research Guide  
• Biology/Life Sciences Research Guide  
• English & American Literature Research Guide  

Education in the News

Newspapers serve as important primary sources, providing opinions, summaries, and details regarding changes in education and education policy. UMD provides students with access to a number of newspaper archives that cover topics including No Child Left Behind, bilingual education, disability services in schools, integration/bussing, TESOL in the US and abroad, and many more. Below is a list of contemporary newspapers covering issues of education, plus tools for comparing different opinions on those issues. For tips on finding even more newspapers through the NexisUni database, check out the tutorial in the Historical Newspapers tab.

• Baltimore Sun (1990 to present) Provides citations, abstracts and full-text articles from the newspaper. Coverage of local and state news for Baltimore and Maryland. Full-text: September, 1990--present
• Christian Science Monitor Provides citations, abstracts and full-text articles from the newspaper. A source of national and international news and analysis, particularly news of developing countries. Sep 30, 1988 (Volume 80, Issue 215) - current. Not Available: Nov 7, 1990 - Mar 20, 1992. Full-text: Sep 30, 1988 (Volume 80, Issue 215) - current.
• CQ Magazine Weekly congressional news and analysis. Full text available from 1983 -- present. All the major policy issues confronting the U.S. Congress: Defense, Economy & Taxes, the Environment, Foreign Policy, Health, Education, and Welfare, Crime, etc.
• Independent Voices Independent Voices is a digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
• New York Times 1980 - (ProQuest) Comprehensive digital coverage back to 1980.
• Wall Street Journal Provides citations, abstracts and full-text articles from the newspaper. A financial newspaper with in-depth coverage of national and international finance as well as political news. Full-text: January, 1984--present

Tools to Aggregate and Compare Viewpoints

• CQ Researcher Full-text database that provides comprehensive analysis of each topic, including history and background information, relevant pro & con arguments, current status, bibliographies, contact information, and outlooks on upcoming "hot topics" in current events. Covers news topics in a wide range of subject fields, from social issues to the environment, health, education, politics, and science and technology. Online access to issues dating back to 1923
• Opposing Viewpoints in Context Fulltext database covering social issues with topic overviews and pro/con viewpoints. Sources include news, journal articles, magazines, media, maps, websites and statistics.

Historical Educational News

Historical newspapers also serve as important primary sources, providing opinions, summaries, and details regarding changes in education and education policy from the time those changes were made. UMD provides students with access to a number of newspaper archives that cover topics including No Child Left Behind, bilingual education, disability services in schools, integration/bussing, TESOL in the US and abroad, and many more.

Find all pre-1990 newspapers accessible through UMD's Database Finder right here . For tips on finding even more newspapers through the NexisUni database, check out the tutorial below.

• Historical Black Newspapers Once in ProQuest click on Databases link at top; click on Select all to de-select the entire list of databases; scroll down to ProQquest Historical Newspapers and select the titles of interest; return to top and click on Use selected databases. Online full-text of: Chicago Defender (1909-1975); New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993); Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002); Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005); Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003); Cleveland Call and Post (1934-1991); Norfolk Journal & Guide (1921-2003); Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001).
• Historical newspapers Searchable full-text of the Los Angeles Times (1881-1986); Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003); Atlanta Constitution (1868-1945); Chicago Tribune (1849-1986); Chicago Defender (1909-1975); Boston Globe (1872-1979); Christian Science Monitor (1908-2001); Cleveland Call and Post (1934-1991); Detroit Free Press (1831-1922); St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1874-1922); Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005); Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001); Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002); San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922); New York Tribune (1841-1922); New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993); Hartford Courant (1764-1984); Norfolk Journal and Guide (1916-2003); Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988); Baltimore Sun (1837-1989); San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922); Wall Street Journal (1889-1997); Washington Post (1877-1998)
• New York Tribune (1841-1922) The New York Tribune (1841-1922) offers full page and article images with searchable full text back to the first issue. The collection includes digital reproductions providing access to every page from every available issue.
• ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger (1857-1922) This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
• Nation Digital Archive The Nation is America's oldest weekly magazine and one if its premier journals of opinion since its inception in 1865. The Nation has long bee regarded as one of the country's definitive journalistic voices of writing on politics, culture, books and the arts and continues to stand as the independent voice in American journalism. This database contains indexing & abstracting and full text for the complete archive of The Nation beginning with its first issue in 1865 through to the present.
• Times Digital Archive The Times Digital Archive provides convenient access to an extraordinary library of back issues of this renowned newspaper online. By taking the microfilm collection of The Times (London) and producing a high-resolution digital format with searchable images, The Times Digital Archive represents unprecedented access to one of the most highly regarded resources for the study of 18th century history and onward.

How to Search Only News Sources with NexisUni

NexisUni   is a fantastic research tool that lets you search a huge body of documents including news, legislation, and many other materials dealing with legal processes. If you are specifically searching for news sources, you have the option to filter NexisUni's results by type of document. You do this by visiting NexisUni , and selecting the News option before you search.

Education and the Law

Education research often involves legal and governmental documents, including Supreme Court cases like Brown v. Board of Education, educational policy decisions like No Child Left Behind, congressional debates over public school curricula, and more. UMD students are provided access to many databases  that house legislation, court rulings, and other governmental documents.

For a handy overview of how to do legal research, please see the Legal Research guide provided by Celina McDonald , subject specialist in Law for the UMD libraries.

• HeinOnline Legal Full-text access to over 1100 law journals; U.S. treaties; the Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations; U.S. Reports; U.S. Code; U.S. Statutes at Large; U.S. Attorney General Opinions; Public Papers of the President and Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents; and hundred of books considered to be legal classics.
• HeinOnline U.S. Supreme Court Library Full-text access to cases published in /U.S. Reports/ volumes 1 to 540 (1754 to 2003), as well as more recent slip opinions. Includes /U.S. Reports Preliminary Prints/ volumes 535 to 543 (2002-2005), /U.S. Reports Slip Opinions /(2002 - ), several historical texts on the Supreme Court, plus the periodicals /Supreme Court Economic Review /(1982-2000) and /Supreme Court Review /(1960-2000) PDF printing requires Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or later.

Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic) provides fulltext to news, business and legal information. Newspapers date back to the 1970's. Please Note: The Washington Post is no longer included in Nexis Uni.The National Newspapers Core database includes the Washington Post.

• Congressional Publications Access to the full text of congressional publications. Includes: hearings, legislative histories, committee prints and reports, House and Senate documents, Congressional Record, Serial Set, CRS Reports, bills, public laws, regulations... Congressional hearings, public issues, legislation, history, and legal research.
• ProQuest Legislative Insight Federal legislative history service providing access to full text publications created by Congress during the process leading up to the enactment of U.S. Public Laws. Documents include bills (all versions), legislative reports, documents, CRS reports, committee prints, speeches in the Congressional Record and presidential signing statements. Currently, Parts A, C, and D are available which include legislative histories from 1929-2014.
• Making of Modern Law Full-text online archive of historical legal treatises from the United States and Great Britain. The collection covers nearly every aspect of law, encompassing a range of analytical, theoretical, and practical literature. Gift of Louis M. Riehl, University of Maryland School of Law Class of 1938.

Video Resources for Education

Some databases provide access to film or other media rather than articles. The videos in the databases listed below include documentaries on education, primary sources (film taken in a classroom setting), and more.

• Counseling and Therapy in Video Provides the largest and richest online collection of video available for the study of social work, psychotherapy, psychology, and psychiatric counseling. The collection's wealth of video and multiplicity of perspectives allow students and scholars to see, experience, and study counseling in ways never before possible. This current release includes over 500 videos totaling roughly 540 hours.
• Education in Video Online streaming video developed specifically for training and developing teachers. More than 1,000 video titles totaling 750+ hours of teaching demonstrations, lectures, documentaries, and primary-source footage of students and teachers in actual classrooms give education students a way to observe the intricacies of behavior, tone, facial expression, and body language that define effective teaching styles.
• Filmakers Library Online Filmakers Library Online is a multidisciplinary collection of well known documentaries already heavily used in humanities and social science classrooms. The coverage is topical, contemporary, and cross-disciplinary, specializing in studies of race and gender, human rights, globalization, multiculturalism, international relations, criminal justice, and the environment. The collection includes bioethics, health, political science and current events, psychology, arts, literature, and more. Additionally, titles in Filmakers Library Online present international points of view of both historical and current experiences from diverse cultures and traditions world-wide.
• Films on Demand Master Academic Collection Streaming video service of almost 12,000 full length videos of high-quality educational titles. Subject sets featured are: business & economics, humanities & social sciences, science & mathematics, health & medicine. This collection also includes thousands of video clips and a collection of archival films & newsreels. Special features allow users the ability to organize and bookmark clips, create and share playlists; most videos available with closed-captioning and interactive transcripts; may be viewed through most mobile devices.
• << Previous: Using eBooks (Guide)
• Next: Research Methods >>
• Last Updated: Jun 18, 2024 12:38 PM
• URL: https://lib.guides.umd.edu/childrensliterature

The Hechinger Report

Covering Innovation & Inequality in Education

PROOF POINTS: This is your brain. This is your brain on screens

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Studies show that students of all ages, from elementary school to college, tend to absorb more when they’re reading on paper rather than screens. The advantage for paper is a small one, but it’s been replicated in dozens of laboratory experiments , particularly when students are reading about science or other nonfiction texts.

Experts debate why comprehension is worse on screens. Some think the glare and flicker of screens tax the brain more than ink on paper. Others conjecture that students have a tendency to skim online but read with more attention and effort on paper. Digital distraction is an obvious downside to screens. But internet browsing, texting or TikTok breaks aren’t allowed in the controlled conditions of these laboratory studies.

Neuroscientists around the world are trying to peer inside the brain to solve the mystery. Recent studies have begun to document salient differences in brain activity when reading on paper versus screens. None of the studies I discuss below is definitive or perfect, but together they raise interesting questions for future researchers to explore. 

One Korean research team documented that young adults had lower concentrations of oxygenated hemoglobin in a section of the brain called the prefrontal cortex when reading on paper compared with screens. The prefrontal cortex is associated with working memory and that could mean the brain is more efficient in absorbing and memorizing new information on paper, according to a study published in January 2024 in the journal Brain Sciences. An experiment in Japan, published in 2020, also noticed less blood flow in the prefrontal cortex when readers were recalling words in a passage that they had read on paper, and more blood flow with screens.

But it’s not clear what that increased blood flow means. The brain needs to be activated in order to learn and one could also argue that the extra brain activation during screen reading could be good for learning. 

Instead of looking at blood flow, a team of Israeli scientists analyzed electrical activity in the brains of 6- to 8-year-olds. When the children read on paper, there was more power in high-frequency brainwaves. When the children read from screens, there was more energy in low-frequency bands. 

The Israeli scientists interpreted these frequency differences as a sign of better concentration and attention when reading on paper. In their 2023 paper , they noted that attention difficulties and mind wandering have been associated with lower frequency bands – exactly the bands that were elevated during screen reading. However, it was a tiny study of 15 children and the researchers could not confirm whether the children’s minds were actually wandering when they were reading on screens. 

Another group of neuroscientists in New York City has also been looking at electrical activity in the brain. But instead of documenting what happens inside the brain while reading, they looked at what happens in the brain just after reading, when students are responding to questions about a text. 

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE in May 2024 , was conducted by neuroscientists at Teachers College, Columbia University, where The Hechinger Report is also based. My news organization is an independent unit of the college, but I am covering this study just like I cover other educational research. 

In the study, 59 children, aged 10 to 12, read short passages, half on screens and half on paper. After reading the passage, the children were shown new words, one at a time, and asked whether they were related to the passage they had just read. The children wore stretchy hair nets embedded with electrodes. More than a hundred sensors measured electrical currents inside their brains a split second after each new word was revealed.

For most words, there was no difference in brain activity between screens and paper. There was more positive voltage when the word was obviously related to the text, such as the word “flow” after reading a passage about volcanoes. There was more negative voltage with an unrelated word like “bucket,” which the researchers said was an indication of surprise and additional brain processing. These brainwaves were similar regardless of whether the child had read the passage on paper or on screens. 

However, there were stark differences between paper and screens when it came to ambiguous words, ones where you could make a creative argument that the word was tangentially related to the reading passage or just as easily explain why it was unrelated. Take for example, the word “roar” after reading about volcanoes. Children who had read the passage on paper showed more positive voltage, just as they had for clearly related words like “flow.” Yet, those who had read the passage on screens showed more negative activity, just as they had for unrelated words like “bucket.”

For the researchers, the brainwave difference for ambiguous words was a sign that students were engaging in “deeper” reading on paper. According to this theory, the more deeply information is processed, the more associations the brain makes. The electrical activity the neuroscientists detected reveals the traces of these associations and connections. 

Despite this indication of deeper reading, the researchers didn’t detect any differences in basic comprehension. The children in this experiment did just as well on a simple comprehension test after reading a passage on paper as they did on screens. The neuroscientists told me that the comprehension test they administered was only to verify that the children had actually read the passage and wasn’t designed to detect deeper reading. I wish, however, the children had been asked to do something involving more analysis to buttress their argument that students had engaged in deeper reading on paper.

Virginia Clinton-Lisell, a reading researcher at the University of North Dakota who was not involved in this study, said she was “skeptical” of its conclusions, in part because the word-association exercise the neuroscientists created hasn’t been validated by outside researchers. Brain activation during a word association exercise may not be proof that we process language more thoroughly or deeply on paper.

One noteworthy result from this experiment is speed. Many reading experts have believed that comprehension is often worse on screens because students are skimming rather than reading. But in the controlled conditions of this laboratory experiment, there were no differences in reading speed: 57 seconds on the laptop compared to 58 seconds on paper –  statistically equivalent in a small experiment like this. And so that raises more questions about why the brain is acting differently between the two media. 

“I’m not sure why one would process some visual images more deeply than others if the subjects spent similar amounts of time looking at them,” said Timothy Shanahan, a reading research expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 

None of this work settles the debate over reading on screens versus paper. All of them ignore the promise of interactive features, such as glossaries and games, which can swing the advantage to electronic texts . Early research can be messy, and that’s a normal part of the scientific process. But so far, the evidence seems to be corroborating conventional reading research that something different is going on when kids log in rather than turn a page.

This story about  reading on screens vs. paper was written by Jill Barshay and produced by  The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for  Proof Points  and other  Hechinger newsletters .

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Reading on paper involves more physical activity than on a screen. I find that my eyes tend to wander when reading on a screen and at times become very fatigued. If the text is complex then on paper I can use a finger to focus my attention. I am a speed reader when reading print on paper, and slower when reading text online, It maybe an age thing (89) but I am more comfortable holding a book than looking at a screen. My eyes tire quickly when reading on a laptop, ipad or phone. I like to take notes when reading complex material as it helps with retention of material.

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The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Books

“It didn’t even feel like learning.”

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R ecently, an old friend of mine from elementary school ran a hand over my bookshelf, stopped, and said, “You stole this.”

“I did not!”

“Yes, you did. You totally stole it from school.”

She pulled out my copy of The Once and Future King , and showed me the inside of the front cover. It was stamped: Board of Education, City of New York .

Okay, so I stole it. But I had a good reason. I loved that book so much; I couldn’t bear to return it to the school library.

My grade-school memories are full of books: bulletin boards that tracked the class read-a-thons, hand-written book reports, summer-reading lists. But a student growing up, as I did, in New York City’s District 20 will have a very different experience today. The city has adopted a new literacy regimen under which many public elementary schools are, in effect, giving up the teaching of books—storybooks, narrative nonfiction books, children’s chapter books—altogether. The curriculum is part of an initiative from Eric Adams’s administration called, ironically, NYC Reads.

Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading

Plummeting reading comprehension is a national problem , but it’s particularly acute in New York City. Half of its third to eighth graders—and 60 percent of those who are Black and Latino—cannot read at grade level . Although COVID drove those numbers down, a big factor has been the much-lambasted pedagogical method known as balanced literacy, which grew out of Columbia University’s Teachers College. Embraced by the city and then much of the nation back in 2003, balanced literacy attempted to teach kids to read not through phonics, but by exposing them to books of their choice in order to foster a love of reading. The appalling literacy numbers speak volumes about the efficacy of this approach.

Elementary schools are now replacing balanced literacy with a different pedagogy, called the science of reading, based on a large body of research finding that learning to read and write well requires phonics, vocabulary development, and content and context comprehension. The Adams administration announced NYC Reads in May 2023 to make sure that schools followed through with this proven approach. “The data shows that young readers learn best when there is explicit phonics instruction, and a young reader cannot experience the joys of reading if they do not know how to read,” a spokesperson for the city’s public schools told me. So far, so good. The schools were given three curricula to choose from, and each district’s superintendent was to make a decision after conferring with principals and parents. Half of the city’s districts were selected for Phase 1 of the rollout and had to adopt a curriculum immediately. Phase 2 schools begin their new curriculum this September.

Although all three curricula are rooted in the science of reading and have met the standards of EdReports—an independent curriculum reviewer—they are not created equal. One, called EL Education, implements the science of reading by using fiction and nonfiction books, such as Hey, Little Ant and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind , to teach students not just to read, but also to talk about real-world issues. Another, called the Wit & Wisdom curriculum, also uses books, such as Stone Soup and Ruby Bridges Goes to School , to “pique curiosity” in students.

But the third, called Into Reading, replaces individual books with one textbook for each grade, all called myBook .

The myBook s are filled with lessons on phonics for younger kids and then, as the grades go up through elementary school, with reading content made up of excerpts of longer narrative texts. MyBook is what is known in education circles as a “decodable text,” but one mom I spoke with, Alina Lewis, likened it to a “Dick and Jane reader.” Where kids used to read and discuss whole books, they now get a few paragraphs at a time and then are prompted to answer a question. Reading has been distilled to practicing for a comprehension exam.

Beginning in September, this is what the majority of elementary-school kids in New York City will be doing. More than two-thirds of its school districts selected the Into Reading curriculum. For those kids, learning to read will no longer revolve around books.

Both the publisher behind Into Reading, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and the city’s department of education rejected the idea that this curriculum does away with books. “It is blatantly untrue that any of the curriculum options under NYC Reads eliminates engaging with whole books,” the city spokesperson told me, adding that “80 percent of the selections within Into Reading are full-length kids books.” An HMH spokesperson quoted the same statistic to me.

What, exactly, were they referring to? If 80 percent of myBook were made up of cover-to-cover books, no child’s backpack could handle it. In part they seemed to be counting books that a teacher might make available to students. “Into Reading incorporates multiple opportunities for kids to read full-length books at every grade level,” the publisher’s spokesperson wrote in an email. “This includes whole books that are reproduced within the student myBook but also book club/small group novel reading, classroom library reading selections for small and independent reading opportunities, and read-aloud full book selections.” But teachers, parents, and students say that, in practice, the curriculum doesn’t leave much time for such opportunities.

When I asked for examples of books that were included within myBook itself, the city spokesperson pointed to Kitoto the Mighty , by Tololwa M. Mollel, for fourth grade. Let me tell you: I have now read Kitoto the Mighty . It’s lovely, but it’s basically a picture book. It’s a far cry from a chapter book that builds reading stamina like, say, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing —or a chapter-book series like Alvin Ho that might keep kids devouring book after book for weeks.

O ne sunny day in the spring of 2023, before the Adams mandate went into effect, I hopped on the train not toward Manhattan, as usual, but farther into Brooklyn. I was heading to speak to a fifth-grade writing class at P.S. 503 in Sunset Park, close to where I grew up. The principal, Nina Demos, and I had been first-grade classmates, and had been in touch off and on throughout our lives.

P.S. 503 is located in District 20, the same district that Demos and I had attended as girls. It is now, as it was then, composed primarily of lower-income, Latino families, many of them recent immigrants. When I visited, the students had been writing their own books—graphic novels or chapter books about Latino superheroes, or immigrant kids who missed their old soccer team. We talked about the difference between imagining a draft and the work of revision. They read passages from their stories and peppered me with questions about writing a novel and what Sunset Park was like when I was a kid.

But that was before the new curriculum, which District 20 began teaching in September. Theoretically, Into Reading gives teachers some independence to shape their own classes, but in District 20, teachers and parents say, the rollout has been draconian. Teachers have been subject to constant evaluation to ensure that they are teaching Into Reading purely, while students face frequent assessments to ensure that they’re meeting each benchmark. Little room is left over for class visitors or story time or exploratory reading.

Alina Lewis is a District 20 parent—her children go not to P.S. 503 but to the district’s gifted-and-talented school, called Brooklyn School of Inquiry—and she has led a fierce opposition to the new curriculum. She told me how the first year under Into Reading went at BSI: “They’d come in from the [Department of Education], and they’d literally go into the classrooms and make sure there were no remnants” of the old style of teaching.

BSI was an outlier: Before the switch, more than 85 percent of students were already reading at or above grade level. The data for this year aren’t in yet, but the student reviews are: They miss books. And they’re bored.

At a DOE forum in March, students from BSI’s middle school testified about their experience with the Into Reading curriculum. “It didn’t even feel like learning,” Carlo Murray said. It “felt like the state test prep that we do every year.”

“We are this far into the school year,” Kira Odenhal said, “and unfortunately we are only reading our second whole book.”

Though the city’s spokesperson told me that decisions were made after “a rigorous engagement process with superintendents and communities,” many District 20 parents felt blindsided by the new curriculum. When BSI’s principal announced the district’s choice at the school’s May PTA meeting, Lewis told me, “the parents went nuts; we flipped out.”

Lewis was well-versed in all three curricula. A former teacher and school administrator, she was a doctoral candidate in educational theory and practice when the mandate came down. Equipped with her experience and research skills, and without a 9 to 5 to tie her down, Lewis organized a campaign to obtain a waiver for Brooklyn School of Inquiry. The students were so disenchanted with the new curriculum that enlisting other families to her cause was easy.

They wrote letters, met with the superintendent, attended meetings of the DOE—including the one in which children testified about missing books—and courted local press. And they won: This fall, Brooklyn School of Inquiry will be allowed to return to its own curriculum.

F ew other Phase 1 schools have access to a parent with as much time and know-how as Lewis. If you look at a map of Phase 1, you’ll see that it includes many districts in the city’s most heavily immigrant, Black, and brown areas. Just a single district in Manhattan is in Phase 1, and it’s the one that covers parts of Harlem, East Harlem, and Spanish Harlem. In Brooklyn, Phase 1 skipped over District 15, which includes wealthy Park Slope, and District 13, among the highest ranked in the city, which runs through the posh areas of DUMBO, Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, and what, to me, feels like the most gentrified slice of Bed-Stuy. I know because I live there.

“It’s not an accident who is Phase 1 and Phase 2,” Lewis told me. “I think we took them by surprise because they literally sought all the either Black and brown districts or the heavily immigrant districts. And they figured they’d be quiet.”

The DOE disputes this. “The socioeconomic demographics of a district were not among the deciding factors,” the department’s spokesperson told me. Instead, districts were chosen for Phase 1 because they had had greater exposure to the new way of teaching already, she said: “The districts participating in Phase 2 were districts where fewer schools were familiar with the new curriculum and therefore benefited greatly from the additional training time.” It’s true that many teachers had already started relying on Into Reading. This is, in part, because during the pandemic, when teachers were scrambling for materials, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt made all of its courses free online. But the city’s rationale raises the question: If the curriculum is so good, and many schools are already using it, why are their reading scores so low?

The rollout in District 13 will be very different from that of District 20. Being in Phase 2 gave the schools an extra year to carefully choose their curriculum. The superintendent, Meghan Dunn, held focus groups with parents, meetings with principals, and even sit-downs with representatives from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the nonprofit groups that created the other two curricula, so everyone could better understand which would align with the district’s needs. Dunn met with at least one school’s PTA to assure them that teachers would still have flexibility in implementing whatever was chosen.

That school, P.S. 11, like Brooklyn School for Inquiry, also had high reading rates, and parents were deeply concerned about fixing something that wasn’t broken. Unlike many other affluent city school districts, District 13 is notably diverse, and wanted to be sure that the chosen curriculum would be sensitive to that. In January, Dunn sent parents a letter announcing that she had selected the EL Education curriculum and outlining the process behind the decision. She explained that teachers would begin curriculum training immediately—giving them an additional five months of professional development that teachers at Phase 1 schools were not afforded. Her letter closed with her commitment to fostering “proficiency and a love of reading and writing.”

T he Park Slope district went with Wit & Wisdom. So did District 2, the one that includes the Upper East Side. Not one of the city’s three top-ranking districts selected Into Reading. But 22 of the city’s 32 total districts did.

This is especially surprising given that a 2022 analysis by New York University had criticized Into Reading for lacking stories about or written by people of color. Across the grade-level texts, for every 100 main characters, only 18 were Black, 13 were Asian, and 12 were Latino. The texts “used language and tone that demeaned and dehumanized Black, Indigenous and characters of color, while encouraging empathy and connection with White characters,” the report concluded. For a school system that is 65 percent Black or Hispanic, and 17 percent Asian, that is a pretty damning critique. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released a statement saying that the report was “deeply flawed” and “mischaracterizes Into Reading as a whole.”)

How, then, to account for the popularity of this curriculum among school administrators? One answer might simply be good marketing. Another might be ease.

As a large corporation, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was probably better positioned to advertise its curriculum than the nonprofits that own EL Education and Wit & Wisdom were. Into Reading was already familiar to many teachers because of its availability during the pandemic. Those who hadn’t yet used it were likely reassured by its reputation as the easiest for teachers to unpack, which was a significant upside, given the short window Phase 1 schools had for teacher training.

When asked about this short window, the DOE replied that Phase 1 teachers all “received professional development throughout Spring 2023, with makeup sessions during the summer” and “individual coaching” through the school year. But teachers have been vocal about feeling unprepared, according to the education site Chalkbeat .

Into Reading is also the only curriculum available fully in English and Spanish, making it a reasonable choice for a school with a lot of ESL students (though this is a particularly cruel irony in light of the troubling findings about its racial bias).

P.S. 503 is not a gifted-and-talented school. Its student body includes ESL learners and students with learning disabilities. About 47 percent of its students score proficient in reading. This year, according to Demos, the principal, the data look comparable or slightly better than the year before. But she notes that that has been the case every year for the past nine years. Demos has criticisms of Into Reading, but she admitted that “there are aspects of it that I appreciate more than I thought I was going to.” She said that its insistence on assessments and standards seems helpful for students who are reading close to, but not quite at, grade level. “And I do think that that is something that I feel is successful, and that we as a school need to reflect on. Like, were our practices in the past holding students in that category back? Has this curriculum helped us push the rigor for those students?”

The improvement among those mid-performing readers is proof that the shift away from balanced literacy toward a science-based approach is correct. But New York could have done so much better than this rushed rollout, the loss of teacher autonomy, and above all the depressing myBook itself.

“The requirements and the mandates are so excessive,” Demos said, that teachers have no time to help students engage with books for pleasure. This was something the BSI students complained about during their public hearing. Demos recounted a parent saying that her child is “doing really well with this curriculum,” but that the child wasn’t having the experience of “falling in love with a series, falling in love with reading.” (One wonders whether Houghton Mifflin Harcourt thought this through: Training the next generation out of the habit of reading books doesn’t seem to be in a book publisher’s best long-term interest.)

Read: How to show kids the joy of reading

When we were kids, I used to go over Demos’s house, and we’d lie in her room and read. She introduced me to the Little House books. We’d talk about Laura and Mary Ingalls as if they were our friends, too, as if we lived not in Brooklyn but out there on the prairie. When Demos talks about kids losing their love of reading, the loss feels visceral to me. I had some amazing teachers over my years in public school, but I had some duds too. The books we read expanded my mind, regardless of who was in front of my class.

Knowing how to read is crucial, but loving to read is a form of power, one that helps kids grow into curious, engaged, and empathetic adults. And it shouldn’t belong only to New York’s most privileged students.

William A. Galston, Elaine Kamarck

June 28, 2024

Robin Brooks, Ben Harris

June 26, 2024

Yemi Osinbajo

Sofoklis Goulas

June 27, 2024

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New York’s First Black Librarians Changed the Way We Read

How the women who ran libraries during the Harlem Renaissance built collections and, just as important, communities of writers and readers.

By Jennifer Schuessler

It was a banner day in the history of American libraries — and in Black history. On May 25, 1926, the New York Public Library announced that it had acquired the celebrated Afro-Latino bibliophile Arturo Schomburg’s collection of more than 4,000 books, manuscripts and other artifacts.

A year earlier, the library had established the first public collection dedicated to Black materials, at its 135th Street branch in Harlem. Now, the branch would be home to a trove of rare items, from some of the earliest books by and about Black people to then-new works of the brewing Harlem Renaissance.

Schomburg was the most famous of the Black bibliophiles who, starting in the late 19th century, had amassed impressive “parlor libraries” in their homes. Such libraries became important gathering places for Black writers and thinkers at a time when newly created public libraries — which exploded in number in the decades after 1870 — were uninterested in Black materials, and often unwelcoming to Black patrons.

Schomburg summed up his credo in a famous 1925 essay , writing, “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” In a 1913 letter, he had put it less decorously: The items in his library were “powder with which to fight our enemies.”

But powder needs someone to load it. That is, books need librarians.

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