In this chapter we review current literature on how to design effective digital reading environments to support students’ comprehension and learning. Digital texts incorporate interactive features, such as hyperlinks or multimedia representations, which can act as affordances or as constraints for comprehension. Features that support students’ attempts to focus on the text’s gist tend to improve comprehension, while those that distract them from the main points tend to have detrimental effects. In addition, digital environments can incorporate elements to support students’ reading regulation, such as feedback prompts. Effective design is needed to motivate students’ use of such support. Students’ characteristics, such as age, prior knowledge or attention abilities, may moderate the effects of digital texts’ interactive and support features. Accordingly, when designing effective digital reading comprehension environments key students’ characteristics should be considered to maximize digital affordances while minimizing their constraints. Finally, we discuss the potential limitations of digital reading comprehension environments, and propose hybrid scenarios where digital and printed texts are used to support different reading comprehension processes.
Funding for this work was provided by Grant PID2020-118512GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033, from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
