Leilani Cauthen 
In this 2022 essay, Leilani Cauthen argues that animated, illustrated and interactive digital reading programs can make written words feel less flat for young readers. The section below, added in 2026, looks at what controlled studies say about reading programs for elementary students on screens and how to choose among them.
Written words are motionless and unremarkable when approached by human eyes. They lie on paper in black and white, unmoving. It isn’t very interesting for children, so we have picture books. Still, we expect students to be able to read the boring stuff because some of it has concepts that must be learned in school or professional life. Even a lot of digital curriculum is “flat,” being text-only pages with small amounts of motion by the scroll bar. Can digital reading programs change that?
When reading, the mind must first incorporate motionlessness. If not managed by teaching or a digital method to introduce creative inception reflective of the words (mental visuals), this inertia has a barrier effect to literacy often overlooked. Some minds comprehend words only when “reading” then rises to mean, but to create mental motion visuals and interrelationships to other concepts is the truest literacy. That is a mind that is comprehending dimensionally.
Because of the initial motionlessness of the written word, reading can also start to equate to the reader the rate at which they should think, the same rate as they read and comprehend. This is where inequity of achievement begins. Slow readers are indoctrinated in slow thinking, and down they go. It’s a horrible corollary.
Language is a symbology, both spoken and written, a bridge between us and others, so your rate of using it is a significant indicator of your intelligence, as judged by others. When creative inception is undeveloped through rich teaching of reading to be fast, language itself can become adversarial to learning. It puts a mental slow-down directly. It makes a person look dull and unintelligent just because he or she is a slow reader or talker.
The motionlessness of written words shouldn’t be the first exposure schools give to reading because youth’s attention typically moves about and rarely deflates to a complete stop for flat words on paper. It’s like being on the wrong frequency with them, especially with something they cannot see, hear, touch, or put in their mouths. Getting their attention with black and white paper words after most children today have been exposed to iPhones and iPads since they were 2-year-olds is today like trying to get a teenager to dial a rotary phone with no instructions (one of the most hilarious videos on the web today (Play video) of 17-year-olds trying just that). Parents and primary teachers can overcome these facts of life by continuing to introduce reading by reading to children with all the added drama they can muster, showing the pictures in the stories, and creating a bit of mystery about the squiggles on the pages that are the words. These might be apparent facts, but what are the new developments in digital reading programs to take literacy success into guaranteed realms of certainty?
A New Answer – Digital Reading Programs
Digital reading programs can come in several flavors. One is book libraries on demand, sometimes enveloped in pre-testing for reading level and a lot of analytics about the reading rate and more like Overdrive and Vitalsource. These are great, but few include programming inside the book to deliver richer content with animations, sound, and graphics that inject life into words. They have the magic of pictures in many books, and they can automagically place the proper literacy leveled books in student libraries so that no student gets discouraged early on by the wrong picks.
Other digital reading programs are within systems that may provide short videos, such as BrainPOP, Awesome Stories, Safari Montage, StrongMind, and many others as inclusive parts of the reading. These are great ways to add interest and successfully invoke meaning.
Finally, there are reading programs such as learning games like Squiggle Park. These typically are the height of code programming skills to render a book passage nearly a virtual interactive world, pacing the reader through a rich mix of animations and sounds that portray the words. Some digital curriculum even allows the student to choose a character they put into the story and pick various ends of the story based on their preferences, like Amplify.
Reading with these levels of meaning can go a long way to interest readers and cause them to imaginatively create mental pictures of what they read when they read flat text. There is much to be said about “teaching by example,” and digital reading programs show great promise in solving the issues of reading to lay a foundation for life-long achievement with every child.
As you review the plethora of options in the App markets and websites, keep in mind that quality digital curriculum reading can and should fluidly incorporate examples of visuals, sounds, screen motion swoops, and more to drive creative inception to then occur by students voluntarily. This is especially true for the younger children, especially if there are reading periods personally assigned and the teacher is not doing the reading aloud to the whole group all the time. Well-illustrated books have always tried to make words less “flat,” but in the digital realm, the lengths to which programmers can go to animate words are enormous.
Reading programs for elementary students: what the evidence says about screens
Leilani Cauthen asks whether digital reading programs can add movement, sound and pictures to words that sit still on a page. School leaders who are choosing reading programs for elementary students need an answer that comes from comparisons between paper and screen, and several large reviews have appeared. They are more cautious than the original essay, but they agree with Cauthen on one important point: what a digital book adds matters more than the fact that it is digital.
Paper and screen for young children
The review most relevant to elementary schools is a 2021 meta-analysis by May Irene Furenes, Natalia Kucirkova and Adriana Bus in Review of Educational Research. A meta-analysis combines results from many studies. This one covered 39 studies with 1,812 children aged 1 to 8. It found that plain digital versions of books led to lower story comprehension than print. When an adult guided the reading of a print book, children did better than when they read a digital book alone. Digital books with enhancements related to the story, such as animations that fit the plot, did outperform print. An embedded dictionary helped vocabulary but not comprehension.
That last finding connects directly to Cauthen’s argument. Cauthen describes programs that put sound and animation inside a passage so that readers form mental pictures. The review suggests that such features can help when they match the story, and that features unrelated to the story do not. It also suggests that a program should not replace an adult who reads with a child and talks about the book.
For preschool children, a 2025 meta-analysis by Chenxin Liang, Li Zhang and Jin Sun in the International Journal of Early Childhood combined 29 studies from two decades. Digital reading gave a small comprehension edge and a larger vocabulary benefit, younger children gained more, and children from low-income backgrounds gained less. The authors point to adult co-reading and socioeconomic status as factors in comprehension. The age range differs from elementary school, so the result is a guide to the early years, not a prediction for older students.
Older readers and longer texts
Studies of older students and adults add a caution. A 2024 review and meta-analysis by Ladislao Salmerón and colleagues in the Journal of Educational Psychology examined tablets and similar handheld devices and found a small comprehension advantage for print. The gap was larger for undergraduates and for participants tested individually. The authors call for continued print reading in schools alongside effective use of devices. A 2024 study by Frank Hakemulder and Anne Mangen in Reading Research Quarterly ran three experiments on literary reading and linked frequent reading of short texts on screens with less willingness to read longer texts and less reflection on a text’s personal meaning. These findings are about readers older than most elementary students, so they are cautions for planning and not results for the early grades.
How a school can choose
None of the studies above evaluates a named commercial product, and the essay’s list of products dates from 2022, so a school should check any program on its own merits. The questions below follow from the research:
- Do the animations, sounds and choices relate to the meaning of the text, or are they decoration? The Furenes review found that story-related enhancements helped and that unrelated ones did not.
- Does the program leave room for an adult or an older student to read with the child and discuss the book? Adult guidance helped in the same review.
- Does the program also build the basic skills of decoding and fluency? Cauthen’s essay is about comprehension and imagination, and a school will want a plan for the foundations as well. The edCircuit science of reading guide covers those foundations.
- Does the school keep time for print books, as the Salmerón review recommends?
- Can the school see the data? Ask the vendor what evidence exists from schools like yours, and which students were in the studies.
Cauthen also writes that parents and primary teachers can read aloud with drama and show the pictures. The research on adult-guided reading supports that advice, and it costs nothing. A reading program can add to shared reading and cannot take its place.
For more, see edCircuit’s literacy and reading coverage.
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