Improving Students’ Reading Comprehension Performance in Elementary Schools: The Impact of Various Multimedia Animation Types

This research aims to examine the effect of multimedia animation-based instruction on 4th-grade elementary school students' reading comprehension (RC) scores in Turkish stories. Elementary school emerges as a critical phase for enhancing RC proficiency among students. Unfortunately, children in pre- and elementary education and a substantial number of adolescents globally encounter difficulties with reading. In the study, a quasi-experimental research design with a post-test is used through two experimental (multimedia-based stories, one with audio narration and one with only subtitles) and two control groups. A total of 100 students attended the study from a public elementary school in a city located in the sought-east of Türkiye. Findings show that multimedia-based stories with either audio narrations or only subtitles are significantly more effective than the traditional instructional method in supporting students' RC scores and motivation. Text difficulty is an important variable that negatively affects students' RC scores; however, multimedia-based stories limit this effect and help the students. Moreover, teachers should consider the text type (content) if they plan to use multimedia-based instruction in their classrooms. Relations of the variables, such as text difficulty/difficulty levels, length of the text, and multimedia animation types, should be investigated for different text types.