Designing for comprehension: A comparison of interactive and non-interactive textbook

The Common Core Standards have started requiring that technology be incorporated into the classroom and standard lessons. It is important for students to be able to be fluent in not just reading but also in technology and multimodal elements, like videos and audio for example. At the same time, e-textbooks are becoming more mainstream, but often vary in how many multimodal elements they include. Some are no different than a printed document while others have interactive, multimodal elements included throughout the text.;This study was conducted to determine if interactive activities or non-interactive activities in an e-textbook had a greater improvement on user comprehension. Participants were divided into two groups; Group A had an interactive version of an e-textbook and Group B had the non-interactive version of the same e-textbook. Both groups read the text and completed the activities within the text before taking a post test. The post test results did not show a clear indication of one version being more effective over the other, but the participants responses indicated that they preferred the interactive version to the non-interactive version.