Investigating the effects of interactive e-book towards academic achievement / Bibiana Chiu-Yiong Lim, Llewellyn Wee-Ling Liu and Chian-Hou Choo

Universities are trending towards electronic books (e-books) as instructional materials, displacing traditional printed books. The rapid acquisition of e-books has changed the way information is presented and one of the improvements is to make e-books interactive. However, there is an incomplete body of knowledge on how interactive e-books affect students, particularly in the learning of statistics. This paper aims to examine the effects of interactive e-books on academic achievement. This paper adopted an experimental approach to test the causal effect of the two types of e-books, namely Traditional E-book (TE) and Interactive E-book (IE) on a sample of undergraduates enrolled in an introductory statistics unit. The experimental results indicated that students who learn statistics through IE produced higher scores in academic achievement than students who learn through TE. The findings of the study first extend the existing theory by showing that TE and IE can account for the variations in academic achievement. The study implied that e-books should not be static and e-book publishers and educators can choose to design their ebooks using interactive formats with animation components depending on available resources. The study offers new insights on how academic achievement of students can be better managed through the design of e-book types.