What Are Preadolescent Readers Doing Online? An Examination of Upper Elementary Students’ Reading, Writing, and Communication in Digital Spaces

Abstract

The online reading, writing, and communication practices of students have been of significant interest to literacy researchers and teachers throughout the last several years, as insights into what students are currently doing in and outside of school can inform what they can be expected to know and be able to do in digital environments. Yet, little is known about the online activities, perceptions, preferences, and skills of preadolescent students. The present study reports the performance of 1,262 fourth and fifth graders on the Survey of Internet Use and Online Reading. Results were analyzed to determine whether there are gender differences in preadolescent students’ Internet activities, perceptions, preferences, and skills. Findings from descriptive and comparative analyses of students’ responses indicate that (a) preadolescent students in this study are moderately skilled at online search, evaluation, and communication tasks, with females scoring significantly higher on digital tasks than males; (b) preadolescent students engage in many digital tasks more frequently in school than outside of school; (c) despite reporting a preference for using the Internet, preadolescent students believe that it is more difficult to use it than to read a book, and believe that they would learn more from a book than from the Internet; and (d) there is a significant gender difference in students’ skills and confidence related to digital tasks, and students’ perceptions of their own skills may not align with their achievement on digital skills–based tasks.

Leisure Reading (But Not Any Kind) and Reading Comprehension Support Each Other—A Longitudinal Study Across Grades 1 and 9

“…Recently, however, the reading habits of children and adolescents have changed profoundly. The reason is the advent of digital reading, also known as electronic reading activities or digital texts (Huang, Orellana, & Capps, ; Hutchison, Woodward, & Colwell, ). This form of reading features a wide variety of activities ranging from digital text reading to e‐mail and chat exchanges.…”

Connected Reading: A Framework for Understanding How Adolescents Encounter, Evaluate, and Engage With Texts in the Digital Age

“…However, the teens in our study, much like the younger students in Hutchison et al. 's () study, suggested that “using the Internet to consume information was more common than using the Internet to communicate and connect with others online” (p. 449). Although connections were important for the decision to read a text, few of our participants indicated that they shared texts with others on a regular basis or with purpose.…”

Pokémon GO: Implications for Literacy in the Classroom

“…Perhaps because of a failure to acknowledge digital multimodal forms in schools, students today do not acknowledge the digital skills demonstrated outside of school as valuable literacy practices (see Lenhart, Arafeh, Smith, & Macgill, , for a discussion of writing). Further, recent research has highlighted the need to support elementary students’ “abilities to read, write, and communicate online” (Hutchison et al., , p. 18). This teaching tip acknowledges Pokémon GO as a multimodal text that students may be interacting with outside of school and explores its application to both conventional and multimodal literacies within the classroom.…”

“…Research has suggested that when teachers are integrating technology into classrooms, they are doing so to pursue traditional academic tasks rather than new text forms afforded by digital tools (Hutchison & Reinking, 2011;Peterson & McClay, 2012). Although students, particularly preadolescent students, may be using digital tools more in the classroom, they have particular difficulty in gathering information from multimodal texts and are inexperienced at creating, rather than consuming information, with media (Hutchison, Woodward, & Colwell, 2016).…”