Laura Burns and Freya Read Books or technology?

What do children in Year 5 and 7 think about electronic books? Our research question: Technology is changing fast. Books are now available in electronic form and we wanted to find out if electronic books were rivalling printed ones and what children’s opinions on them were.

56 participants o We gave out questionnaires and consent forms to 1 form in Year 5 and 1 form in Year 7. o We interviewed 9 students, also from Year 5 and 7. Years 5 and 7 Age range: 9-12 Interviews Questionnaires Our Research

Research Ethics We made sure our research was 100% ethical. Firstly we gained informed consent from all of our research participants. We did this by giving out consent forms with the questionnaire. Additionally, those participants who were involved in an interview completed a consent form. The responses were kept anonymous and confidential, the results were not shared and were only used for the purpose of our research.

Interviews Our interview questions were: What do you think about electronic books? Do you think libraries should have electronic books to read from and why? Do you think it is easier to read from a printed book or an electronic book? Would you rather buy 100 books or a Kindle with 100 books on it? We expanded on these questions in relation to the answers we were given.

Thematic analysis of interviews We used coding to group key points from our interviews into separate sections of information, for example: Practicality Long Lasting System Failures Cost

Results from interviews: reasons why people like electronic books Practical (6 responses) Comfortable (2 responses) Long lasting (1 response) The pages don’t fall out Handy to keep around You can read any book at any time You don’t loose your page Lights up You can enlarge the text

Results from interviews: reasons why people don’t like electronic books System failure (11 responses) Uncomfortable (2 responses) Cost/value (2 responses) Waste of money Battery can run out Memory can be deleted Breaks easily It can damage your eyes The writing is too small

Results from interviews: reasons why people do and don’t like printed books Book damage (3 responses) Aesthetics (3 responses) Cost/value (1 response) Less tempting to steal They take up a lot of space Pages get stuck together Smell nice Impractical (1 response)

Very light You can read any book at any time Easier to carry Kindles can damage your eyes Printed books seem more real We asked: Would you rather buy 100 books or a Kindle with 100 books on it and why?

This graph shows that 55% of the students we asked prefer electronic books. 70% of Year 7s prefer electronic books however only 42% of Year 5s prefer electronic books. One third of the students never read electronic books and surprisingly 3 children do not read printed books. On average people read printed books about 6 times a week and electronic books about 5 times a week. Number of students Do you prefer electronic books to printed books? Don’t know

This bar chart shows a variety of electronic devices that children used. Many of which you can read books on. What do you mainly use your electronic device for? This graph shows that electronic devices are mainly used for games, social media and music. Surprisingly relatively few people use them for reading books. 87% of pupils from the Year 5 and 7 classes that we collected data from had access to an electronic device which they could read from.

The majority of the students we asked agreed with this statement. I we did this research project again we would try to find out more about why this is the case. Number of children Also in our interviews we found that 56% of the same pupils found electronic books easier to read from than printed books. Electronic books encourage you to read more This is a Likert scale question.

Conclusion We have analysed our interviews and questionnaires and finally found out the answer to our question: What do children in Year 5 and 7 think about electronic books? The answer is that the majority of people prefer electronic books. There was a small difference between the age groups, with more year 5s preferring printed books. Also, most people felt that electronic books encourage you to read more. Evaluation It all went really well and we want to thank Cindy and all of our teachers, especially Mrs Doyle and Miss Smith.

Our Answer From our research, we found out that 55% of Year 5 and 7 pupils prefer electronic books to printed books. Reasons included: “They are more practical” “They are more comfortable to use” “They last longer”