Exploring Students’ Reading Self-Efficacy Beliefs within Digital Environments: A Case Study with Amazon Kindles.
Abstract: An e-reader is a mobile device especially designed to display digital forms of written materials. Factors related to students’ personality, like self-efficacy beliefs may be strongly connected to the adoption of modern technologies in educational practice. This paper presents the findings of a case study which aimed to explore the reading self-efficacy beliefs of high-school students who used a dedicated e-reading device (Amazon Kindle DX) to accomplish a reading task. Findings revealed a high level of students’ perceived self-efficacy to operate the device efficiently and a strong sense of faith in their ability to perform challenging reading tasks with the e-reader. On the other hand, no issues of hypothetical comparison with the traditional reading environment were emerged. Students believed that they can use the device supportively to the classic book but not instead of it.