Adriana Bus

University of Stavanger (UiS)

The effectiveness of incorporating independent reading practice in schools has long been a subject of uncertainty. To shed light on this ongoing debate, this meta-analysis seeks to investigate the impact of in-school independent reading on three crucial measures—attitudes toward reading, word recognition, and comprehension—focusing on K–10 students...

The Erasmus Plus project, Stimulating Adventures for Young Learners (SAYL), aims to establish a digital library of picture books, empowering young children to engage in book reading without adult guidance. Our primary focus is on leveraging technology to address challenges that might impede the cognitive processing of stories conveyed through a com...

The objective of the study was to examine how providing access to multilingual digital picture books affected the reading habits and language development of children from bilingual families. The study included 41 children aged 4–5 from two schools whose parents spoke a heritage language distinct from the environmental language (Dutch), and had a lo...

We designed an experiment with stratified randomization to investigate the effects of visual and auditory enhancements in digital picture books on comprehension and incidental word learning. Participants were 183 children aged 3, 4, and 5 years (81 girls and 102 boys) from childcare centers and schools in the Southwest USA. We contrasted the still-...

Many students infrequently read during leisure time. Due to fast, unconscious decisions, they may overlook the possibility of reading. We tested the impact of nudging on reading frequency, reading attitude, and reading skills. Two studies targeting Grades 4 to 6 (N = 105) and Grades 7 and 8 (N = 146) compared: (1) a nudging condition-participants t...

Despite a great deal of research on the relations between preschool executive functions (EF) and demographic variables such as age, sex and school variables (classroom organization and teacher behaviours including quality of educational instruction, planning, organization and teacher-learner relationships), not much is known about these association...

In many schools, independent silent reading of self-selected books is used to promote reading. However, self-selection may be insufficient to counter negative reading experiences, particularly when students choose books not attuned to their reading level and interest. Two studies experimentally tested whether personalized expert guidance when selec...

This study tested whether Bookstart – a program promoting book reading in infancy – continues to have an impact well into Kindergarten. We distinguished between children who were more or less challenging to read to in infancy (more or less temperamentally reactive). Eighty percent (n = 471) of a sample participating in a study when the children wer...

Reading picture books in the first language (L1) before rereading them in the second language (L2) is assumed to be beneficial for young dual language learners (DLLs). This pilot study examined how sharing digital picture books in L1 or L2 at home before reading them in L2 in kindergarten affected L2 book-specific vocabulary learning and story comp...

The study tests the efficacy of a new sort of digital picture book. It includes camera movements to guide children’s visual attention through the pictures and the possibility to control page-turning and the pace at which the camera moves through pictures. There were 56 participants (M age = 60.34 months, SD = 6.24) randomly assigned to three condit...

This meta-analysis examines the inconsistent findings across experimental studies that compared children’s learning outcomes with digital and paper books. We quantitatively reviewed 39 studies reported in 30 articles (n = 1,812 children) and compared children’s story comprehension and vocabulary learning in relation to medium (reading on paper vers...

Digital media availability has surged over the past decade. Because of a lack of comprehensive measurement tools, this rapid growth in access to digital media is accompanied by a scarcity of research examining the family media context and sociocognitive outcomes. There is also little cross-cultural research in families with young children. Modern m...

Book giveaway programs provide free books to families with infants to encourage caregivers to begin reading to their children during infancy. This meta-analysis of 44 studies retrieved from 43 articles tests the effects of three major book giveaway programs: Bookstart (n = 11), Reach Out and Read (n = 18), and Imagination Library (n = 15). Effect s...

Just beginning to understand the potentials new technologies might bring to the learning environments of young children, we invited authors to submit articles that investigate multimedia sources and their effect on learning settings. Two main themes emerged—how digitization changes the learning environment and adult-child interaction in particular...

Apart from being vibrant, many children’s digital books offer a rich source for learning as is confirmed by meta-analytic findings. The present chapter pinpoints ways in which children’s books have been affected by digitization and which multimedia enhancements explain the boost these books provide particularly in groups of easily distractible chil...

The aim of this review is to summarize the available evidence on the impact of shared book reading on the language and literacy skills of children in Asia. While there have been several attempts to summarize the available evidence on the impact of shared book reading on children’s language and literacy skills in general, it is not clear if their fi...

Experiments with film-like story presentations have been found to be beneficial in supporting children’s story comprehension and word learning. The main goal of the current study was to disentangle the effects of visual and auditory enhancements in digital books. Participants were 99 typically developing children (41 boys and 58 girls) aged 4–6 yea...

This study explored longitudinal associations between early shared reading at 2 to 3 years of age and children’s later academic achievement. It examined the mediating role of children’s vocabulary and early academic skills, and the moderating effects of family’s socioeconomic status. Data were drawn from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Childre...

The present article provides an overview of the best-selling apps for the age range of 0–8 years under various categories, including ‘Kids’, ‘Books’, ‘Educational games’, ‘Family games’ and ‘Word games’ in the two major application stores (Google Play and iTunes App Store) in four economically diverse European countries: Hungary, Turkey, Greece and...

In this digital era, a fundamental challenge is to design digital reading materials in such a way that they improve children’s reading skills. Since reading books is challenging for many fifth graders—particularly for those genetically susceptible to attention problems—the researchers hypothesized that guidance from a digital Pedagogical Agent (PA)...

The present study provides experimental evidence regarding 4–6-year-old children’s visual processing of animated versus static illustrations in storybooks. Thirty nine participants listened to an animated and a static book, both three times, while eye movements were registered with an eye-tracker. Outcomes corroborate the hypothesis that specifical...

In a sample of 87 children we tested whether executive functions (memory and inhibition) in preschool predict numeracy and literacy skills in first grade. We controlled for variation attributable to school level, several covariates, and preschool academic skills. The long-term findings indicated that early delays in executive functions are often te...

We compared students from schools with an enriched school library—that is, one with a larger and more up-to-date book collection—with students from schools with a typical school library. We tested effects of an enriched school library on reading motivation, reading frequency, and academic skills. Fourth- and fifth-grade students of 14 schools with...

This study examined whether and how Zambian preschool education stimulates learning to read. A total of 216 children including 118 with a preschool background were tested at the start of first grade and again approximately eight months later. The Basic Skills Assessment Tool for reading and writing (BASAT) was applied at both measurements. Basic sk...

The aim of this study was to test that the ability to obtain information about more than one letter at a glance develops prior to conventional reading. This study included 55 Dutch-speaking prereaders (mean age 63.56 months, SD = 6.55) and 45 Hebrew-speaking prereaders (mean age = 66.71 months, SD = 8.35). In a perceptual span task, one letter was...

In this randomized controlled trial, 508 5-year-old kindergarten children participated, of whom 257 were delayed in literacy skills because they belonged to the lowest quartile of a national standard literacy test. We tested the hypothesis that some children are more susceptible to school-entry educational interventions than their peers due to thei...

A meta-analysis was conducted on the effects of technology-enhanced stories for young children’s literacy development when compared to listening to stories in more traditional settings like storybook reading. A small but significant additional benefit of technology was found for story comprehension (g+ = 0.17) and expressive vocabulary (g+ = 0.20),...

Stories presented on phones, tablets and e-readers now offer an alternative to print books. The fundamental challenge has become to specify when and for whom the manner in which children retain information from stories has been changed by electronic storybooks, for better and for worse. We review the effects of digitized presentations of narratives...

The present meta-analysis challenges the notion that young children necessarily need adult scaffolding in order to understand a narrative story and learn words as long as they encounter optimally designed multimedia stories. Including 29 studies and 1272 children, multimedia stories were found more beneficial than encounters with traditional story...

At the birth of their child, parents living in areas where BookStart has been adopted receive a Package containing a baby book, a CD, and a flyer about book sharing. In this study we tested whether this extensive, nation-wide intervention is a stimulus for language development. Three hundred and fifty-nine ‘BookStart families’ were compared with 22...

Electronic picture storybooks often include motion pictures, sounds, and background music instead of static pictures, and hotspots that label/define words when clicked on. The current study was designed to examine whether these additional elements aid word learning and story comprehension and whether effects accumulate making the animated e-book th...

How can be explained that early literacy and numeracy share variance? We specifically tested whether the correlation between four early literacy skills (rhyming, letter knowledge, emergent writing, and orthographic knowledge) and simple sums (non-symbolic and story condition) reduced after taking into account preschool attention control, short-term...

Alphabet books as studied in this research typically highlight one letter per page combined with a depiction of a word that begins with the letter (e.g., a bear illustrates B). This study tests whether children’s letter knowledge improves as a result of alphabet book sharing and how the visual processing of pictures and letters affects learning fro...

The current study reports on 9-year-old monozygotic twin girls who fail to make any progress in learning basic mathematics in primary education. We tested the hypothesis that the twins' core maths problems were deficits in number sense that manifested as impairments in approximate and small number systems, resulting in impairment in nonsymbolic as...

Children showing poor executive functioning may not fully benefit from learning experiences at home and school and may lag behind in literacy skills. This hypothesis was tested in a sample of 276 kindergarten children. Executive functions and literacy skills were tested at about 61 months and again a year later. In line with earlier studies, correl...

Reading is at the core of any educational experience and reading ability is key to success in society. Unfortunately, a good number of Zambian children are reading below the expected grade level. Currently, there is no empirical evidence to establish the causal factors underlying the persis�tent reading failure of Zambian pupils despite the rich...

Novel word learning is reported to be problematic for children with severe language impairments (SLI). In this study, we tested electronic storybooks as a tool to support vocabulary acquisition in SLI children. In Experiment 1, 29 kindergarten SLI children heard four e-books each four times: (a) two stories were presented as video books with motion...

This chapter discusses the potential role of computer-aided instruction for kindergarten children lacking in competencies fundamental to their school success. It is abundantly evident that the upcoming possibilities of technology as a new tool in education create new capacities of schools for fostering positive development of children at risk. Beca...

Background: The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) has been linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reading disorders. In this study, we examined whether diminished anticipatory dopamine cell firing - typical of the long variant of the DRD4 allele - is related to emergent and advanced alphabetic skills, and whether executive at...

Living Letters is an adaptive game designed to promote children's combining of how the proper name sounds with their knowledge of how the name looks. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) was used to experimentally test whether priming for attending to the sound-symbol relationship in the proper name can reduce the risk for developing reading problem...

In a randomized control trial, the authors tested whether short- and long-term effects of an early literacy intervention are moderated by mild perinatal adversities in accordance with differential susceptibility theory. One-hundred 5-year-old children (58% male) who scored at or below the 30th percentile on early literacy measures were randomized t...

The major purpose of this study was to test how preliterate learners use illustrations in storybooks to understand a story. Subjects were 23 five-year-old low-SES children, learning Dutch as a second language. Each child was exposed four times to a digital picture storybook. Five books were used and counterbalanced over children and repetitions. Du...

In this randomized controlled trial, 312 low-socioeconomic-status children (M age = 52.9 months, SD = 3.2) from 15 Dutch schools participated. Children in the intervention condition played early literacy games via the intelligent tutoring system Living Letters. Control children played a nonliteracy computer game. At the beginning of each interventi...

The Dutch website Bereslim (http:// www.bereslim.nl) provides digital picture storybooks for three- to seven-year-olds for daily use. The present study investigates whether this new opportunity to enhance linguistic development actively assists preschool children from low- and high-educated families in an equal manner. We looked closely at the char...

Not every child seems equally susceptible to the same parental, educational, or environmental influences even if cognitive level is similar. This study is the first randomized controlled trial to apply the differential susceptibility paradigm to education in relation to children's genotype and early literacy skills. A randomized pretest–posttest co...

A lack of familiarity with the language of teaching is blamed for illiteracy rates beyond 40% among people who live in nations in Africa or Asia in which dozens of languages are spoken. For a critical test of the importance of familiarity with the language in which initial reading is practiced, we took the Zambian situation as a natural experiment...

Not all young children benefit from book exposure in preschool age. It is claimed that the ability to hold information in mind (short-term memory), to ignore distraction (inhibition), and to focus attention and stay focused (sustained attention) may have a moderating effect on children's reactions to the home literacy environment. In a group of 228...

This research synthesis examines whether the association between print exposure and components of reading grows stronger across development. We meta-analyzed 99 studies (N = 7,669) that focused on leisure time reading of (a) preschoolers and kindergartners, (b) children attending Grades 1-12, and (c) college and university students. For all measure...

From Levin’s seminal research, it appears that name writing, a natural focus of most young children, is the first stable written form with meaning. Inspired by Levin’s finding, we began to investigate the role of name writing in children’s acquisition of alphabetic knowledge. We present here a series of three Dutch studies from which it appears tha...

Children from immigrant, low-income families in the Netherlands start school with a limited vocabulary in the language of instruction; therefore, this places them at risk for developing reading difficulties. Exposure to books is assumed to reduce their 2nd language (L2) vocabulary disadvantage. In this experiment, we examined the effects of video s...

Does alphabetic-phonetic writing start with the proper name and how does the name affect reading and writing skills? Sixty 4- to 5(1/2)-year-old children from middle SES families with Dutch as their first language wrote their proper name and named letters. For each child we created unique sets of words with and without the child's first letter of t...

Research findingsThe study focused on 90 five-year-olds from fifteen Dutch schools. The children scored among the 30% lowest on literacy tests. Half were randomly assigned to a phonological skills program on the computer, the other half to a book program. Both programs consisted of 15 ten-minute sessions. During the phonological skills program chil...

This meta-analysis examines to what extent interactive storybook reading stimulates two pillars of learning to read: vocabulary and print knowledge. The authors quantitatively reviewed 31 (quasi) experiments (n = 2,049 children) in which educators were trained to encourage children to be actively involved before, during, and after joint book readin...

Even though the acquisition of early literacy skills obviously depends on stimuli and incentives in children’s environment we may expect that genes define the constraints for acquiring some or all early literacy skills. Therefore behavior genetic analyses were carried out on twin data including 27 identical and 39 same sex dizygotic twins, 4years o...

Book reading has been demonstrated to promote vocabulary. The current study was conducted to examine the added value of an interactive shared book reading format that emphasizes active as opposed to noninteractive participation by the child. Studies that included a dialogic reading intervention group and a reading-as-usual control group, and that r...

This study tested how name writing affects young children's emergent writing. Beginning with a group of 96 Dutch children ages 3½-5, we selected more- advanced children who were producing strings of conventional letters but, apart from very few words, no correct or readable (invented) spellings (N = 35). All children recruited from middle-to-high s...

Advanced digital storybooks offer, in addition to an oral rendition of text, the possibility of enhancing story content through the use of video. In three experiments, effects of added video with accompanying music and sound on language comprehension and language acquisition were tested in a group of second language learners from low educated famil...

Thesis (doctoral)--Rijksuniversiteit te Groningen, 1984.

This research focuses on the ability of book-based animated stories, when well designed and produced, to have positive effects on young viewers' narrative comprehension and language skills. Sixty 5-year-olds, learning Dutch as a 2nd language, were randomly assigned to 4 experimental and 2 control conditions. The children profited to some extent fro...

The present research was directed toward the understanding of diagnostic problem-solving behavior of expert practitioners in the field of education. By means of educational and psychological tests, ten practicing reading specialists thought aloud about the same case. After the protocols had been transcribed, scoring was on which information cues we...

The development of children's writing of their own names as compared to their writing of dictated words was examined on samples of children ranging from 2 to 5 years of age, who were immersed in Hebrew or Dutch and recruited from low to high socioeconomic status families. Analyses were based on four data sets collected in three studies. From a youn...

ABSTRACTS A counterbalanced, within‐subjects design was carried out to study the efficacy of electronic books in fostering kindergarten children's emergent story understanding. The study compared effects of children's independent reading of stories electronically with effects of printed books read aloud by adults. Participants were 18 four‐ to five...

Writing and drawing produced by children 28-53 months old were compared. Israeli and Dutch preschoolers were asked to draw and write, to classify their products as drawing and writing, and to decide what they had drawn or written. Israeli and Dutch mothers classified the products. Scores on a scale for writing composed of graphic, "writing-like," a...

This article discusses children’s picture story books on the computer (also known as e-book, CD-ROM story book, talking book, living book, interactive book, digital book, disc book or computer book). These books minimally include an oral reading of the story instead of or in addition to printed text. We put together a collection of 55 Dutch and 5 w...

This chapter discusses the outcomes of a series of studies in which the author closely examined various aspects of parent-preschooler storybook readings. The studies' results suggest on possible explanation of how book reading supports children's literacy development during both the preschool and elementary stages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 201...