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Making Sense of Personalization in Children's Literacy Apps and Digital Books

Mon, April 16, 8:15 to 10:15am, Millennium Broadway New York Times Square, Floor: Sixth Floor, Room 6.01

Abstract

Objectives: With the advent of various forms of reading on screen, substantial empirical and theoretical efforts are being pursued to clarify the role of the specific features of children’s digital books. In the context of reading for pleasure, Author (2016) theorized six such features: affective, sustained, shared, interactive, personalized and creative engagement. This paper is concerned with the personalization feature and children’s reading for pleasure with digital texts (or reading on screen). The aim is to delineate key forms of personalization available in children’s digital books and to probe and suggest new directions for an emerging field of personalization in children’s reading on screen.

Perspectives: The main rationale for using personalization in business and marketing is to increase customers’ engagement and interest in a specific product or brand (Ardissono, Goy, Petrone & Segnan, 2002). In reading for pleasure, personalized books are claimed to support children’s self-esteem and self-concept (Demoulin, 1999) and were found to support children’s word acquisition (Author, 2014) and story comprehension in struggling readers (Bracken, 1982). However, little is known about the forms and processes through which these benefits might occur.

Methods: Weick (1995) established ‘sensemaking’ as a method for elucidating and recognizing theoretical patterns in new phenomena. As a focus of inquiry, sensemaking requires researchers to go beyond simple descriptions and achieve a holistic, nuanced and innovative understanding by systematically studying exemplars and their parameters. The ‘sensemaking’ process of personalization in children’s reading on screen was guided by two research questions: (1) What are the key forms of personalization in children’s e-reading?, (2) What are the relationships and interconnections among these categories?

Data Sources: A systematic content analysis of personalization exemplars in a hundred most popular children’s digital books was conducted. This was followed by a theoretical synthesis of the parameters and relationships among the key personalization categories.

Results: The five overarching categories established through the content analysis were story characteristics, narrative and appearance (products of personalization) and intertextuality and intersubjectivity (process of personalization). Theoretical synthesis of published data showed that intertextual and intersubjective personalization can support the so-called 5As of personalization in children’s reading experiences: authenticity, attachment, authorship, autonomy, and aesthetics. The extent to which these five variables are perceived as beneficial or limiting in children’s reading relates to the degree of a child’s agency in the personalization process.

Significance: The content and theoretical analyses serve as background to the definition of children’s personalized reading for pleasure on screen. The different kinds of personalization identified as available in most popular personalized resources could be incorporated as additional categories for more detailed and specific scoring of children’s digital books.

Author