Kathleen A Paciga Analysis

In the article “Their teacher can't be an app: Preschoolers' listening comprehension of digital storybooks”, Kathleen A. Paciga, discusses the effects that digital storybooks can have on children from low income families or families where the parents may have lower literacy or in which English is not the parents first language. Paciga looks at how children at risk of reading failure aren’t necessarily not listening to their teachers or not trying, but at how they may just not have the same availability of someone to read and practice with them at home. Due to this, she also studies the effects that digital storybooks in the home can have on reading skills in these families. In this article review, I will note the important findings and correlations between students at risk for failing and the
Paciga suggested that using digital storybooks or ebooks in these homes could decrease the preschooler’s risk for reading failure and have an overall positive effect on the child’s schooling. “Viewing and interacting with multimedia yielded significant improvements in the early literacy skills (i.e. vocabulary, letter identification, phonemic awareness) of low-income populations, above and beyond improvements observed in middle- to high-income populations.”(p. 1) The examples given by Paciga, were research by Buckleitner and Fisch. Buckleitner looked at the correlation in regards to how interactive the material was. For example, PDF documents are highly uninteractive while digital storybooks tend to highly interactive. Fisch studied the correlation between how much media the child is exposed to and the content of the media, and the effects it has on children. These arguments were helpful in explaining why digital storybooks have such a positive effect on reading ability in both children of low income families and children in middle-to-high income