Toward a Multifaceted Heuristic of Digital Reading to Inform Assessment, Research, Practice, and Policy

In this commentary, the author explores the tension between almost 30 years of work that has embraced increasingly complex conceptions of digital reading and recent studies that risk oversimplifying digital reading as a singular entity analogous with reading text on a screen. The author begins by tracing a line of theoretical and empirical work that both informs and complicates our understanding of digital literacy and, more specifically, digital reading. Then, a heuristic is proposed to systematically organize, label, and define a multifaceted set of increasingly complex terms, concepts, and practices that characterize the spectrum of digital reading experiences. Research that informs this heuristic is used to illustrate how more precision in defining digital reading can promote greater clarity across research methods and advance a more systematic study of promising digital reading practices. Finally, the author discusses implications for assessment, research, practice, and policy

Who poisoned Hugh? - The STAR framework: integrating learning objectives with storytelling

Little research in Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) has been given to writing stories that convey a set of Learning Objectives (LOs). This is particularly important for educational IDS games. In this paper, we propose the STAR framework for formalizing the design of IDS stories for educational interventions. The story is designed as a set of red-herrings and clue puzzle in which the LOs are integrated. We present one of the three IDSes we designed based on this framework; we use one as a case study and present its evaluation. A study was undertaken to evaluate the game effectiveness in conveying the educational message. This study performed with 145 players shows that the players’ knowledge improved as a result of playing the game and that the change was statistically significant