| Summary: | 博士 === 國立成功大學 === 工程科學系 === 106 === Screen-based reading with e-books has become more acceptable among digital natives, and the greatest challenge to modern education is to leverage technology in order to create appropriate learning experiences for all students. Due to the rapid adoption of tablet computers and other portable devices, such as smartphones, it is now possible to envisage the greater use of e-books to support more efficient and mobile personalized learning. This is important, as it is anticipated that e-books can eventually be used as learning tools to substitute for printed textbooks in the future. While many studies have investigated e-books targeted to undergraduate students, much less attention has been paid to children. As such, an Interactive E-book Reading System (IERS) incorporating e-books was developed in the current work to appeal elementary school students. This study adopted the interactive principles of multimedia learning in order to empower students’ learning experiences with e-books, while also relying on the expertise from a group of in-service teachers so that the system can better meet the students’ learning task needs. An experiment was conducted with 166 elementary school students to evaluate the usability of the developed system, and feedback was also collected from the students. It was found that both the usability and functionality of the developed system were well-suited for most of the students. Moreover, the issues related to student visual fatigue need to be considered before e-books are widely adopted in an academic learning context. Using a reading experiment conducted on 24 elementary school students, this study examined how reading-related factors, including reading materials, reading duration, affect visual fatigue when reading both e-books and paper books. The results showed that different reading materials did not affect the students’ levels of visual fatigue, and concerns about the heavy burden of visual fatigue seem overstated with regard to the change from printed to screen-based reading material. However, the findings on reading duration suggested that long periods of reading without proper rest should be avoided. Based on this study, we can conclude that the tailor-made e-book reading system developed in this study can help deliver a better learning experience to elementary school students. Moreover, the results also enable us to better understand how certain factors are associated with visual fatigue, and thus can be used to make optimal usage suggestions for the application of e-books, in education in order to achieve the potential benefits with regard to student learning.
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