Effects of E-Textbooks on Student Mental Effort in an ESL Middle School Classroom
Abstract: As e-textbooks have been increasingly used in K-12 classrooms, teachers are more able to provide students with content materials with multimedia formats and engage students in the learning process. The purpose of this study was to investigate 36 middle school students’ mental effort when students read e-textbooks demonstrated by their teacher in an English-as-a-Second-Language classroom in a middle school. The researcher used the framework of Paas’s survey to develop survey items to measure the mental effort. The results indicated the students took below-medium mental effort for searching for the pages and above-medium mental effort for comprehending the book content. Besides, students’ personal characteristics were examined to search for the association. The findings may shed light on the effect of e-books on students’ cognitive load and provide educators with some implications for e-textbook technology integration in the K-12 school settings.