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picked TT as the easiest to use, which indicates that the majority of children found TT
not as easy to use as the other interventions. More than 50% of the children picked the
non-interactive app as the easiest to use. This was expected as the application was
direct and did not have interactivity that children had to complete except for picking a
story and pressing next in each page.
The mean scores for best content were TT = 2.67, EB = 2.22, PB = 1.22. A
Friedman test revealed statistical significant difference in perceived best content on
the different reading interventions, χ
2
= 20.81, p<0.0005. Post hoc Wilcoxon tests
revealed the TT was ranked significantly higher on best content than PB, but the
difference between EB and TT was not significant. This finding indicated that
children found the stories in 'Trees of Tales' more interesting than the stories in the
printed topics. It is noteworthy to point here that the stories in 'Trees of Tales' were
carefully selected from traditional folktales in Oman whereas the printed books were
selected from the school library. Hence, providing children with stories and characters
that relate to their culture, made it more interesting for them to read. This finding
supports the view that interest is a factor of intrinsic motivation for reading [9].
School libraries should also consider providing interesting reading material to
motivate children to read more.
The mean scores for children choice for each of the interventions were TT = 0.72,
EB = 0.27, PP = 0.00. A Friedman test revealed that there was a statistical significant
difference in children choices of the interventions to read. Post hoc Wilcoxon tests
revealed that the significant difference was between the PB and TT. The difference in
children choices between the PB and EB and between the EB and the TT was not
significant. Interestingly most children in the sample preferred to read from the 'Trees
of Tales' app although it was not easier to reading from. However, more research is
needed to find out what aspect of 'Trees of Tales' children liked the most and what
the most interesting features of the stories were. More information about the
difficulties the children encountered while using 'Trees of Tales' would be interesting
to inform the future development of the application.
The results presented here reveal that the decision whether or not to use an
interactive reading application is based on how much fun it is perceived to be.
Children's own reports of how much fun the interventions were to use and the most
interesting content they found were correlated to their choices of the reading
interventions they would like to continue using. However, their perceived ease of use
did not correlate with their choice of intervention to read again. This could be due to
their preference for challenge at this age and calls for further research. Challenge is
one of the intrinsic motivation factors that influence reading for pleasure [9].
However, it is important for the application designers to balance challenge with
abilities if we want children to continue reading in the future.
6
Conclusion
This study investigated the effectiveness of designing and developing an interactive
reading application specifically for Arabic children. 'Trees of Tales' was designed
