An Investigation of Visual Fatigue in Elementary School Students Resulting from Reading e-books

Screen-based reading with e-books, which leverages technology in order to create pertinent learning experiences for all students, has become more acceptable to digital natives. Notably, before e-books are widely adopted in academic learning, the visual burden of students during reading activities should be considered. This investigation thus examines how reading-related factors affect visual fatigue incurred when reading both e-books and paper-based books through an experiment conducted on 24 elementary school students. The results showed that the different reading materials have no significant difference in terms of affecting students’ levels of visual fatigue; that is, reading material seems inconsequential with regard to changes in the degree of visual fatigue. Furthermore, another result found that long duration reading led visual to more burden, which also mean that long periods of reading without proper rest should be avoided. As this study of the foundation of visual fatigue reveals, the findings can be as references beneficial for integrating e-books into instruction and providing suggestions for the use of e-books in education. Therefore, we suggest that future studies should consider visual fatigue as important factors in e-book learning activity to promote their more potential benefits with regard to student learning.