Developing reading comprehension skills in digital media

The aim of this study is to improve the digital reading comprehension skills of secondary school 7th grade students. This study was carried out in a quantitative research design. In the study, a quasi-experimental design with pretest-posttest control group was used. The study group consisted of 50 secondary school 7th grade students, 20 in the pilot study, 15 in the experimental group and 15 in the control group. In the research, the pilot study was completed in 4 weeks and the experimental process was completed in 11 weeks. In the study, the experimental group received digital reading training. The control group, on the other hand, received training based on the Turkish Lesson Curriculum. Digital reading tool, Personal information form, Reading texts and Reading comprehension tests were used to collect the data. In the analysis of the data, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test, which is used to test the significance of the difference between the scores in the two related measurements, and the Mann Whitney U-Test, which is used to compare the statistics of two independent samples, were used. In the study, firstly, the students were informed about the features of the reading tool and the reading application used during reading. Then, the main training was given to the students through reading strategies in order to improve their digital reading comprehension skills. Among the reading strategies, reviewing, highlighting, re- reading, using an online dictionary and sharing online were taught by direct teaching method. Strategies of zooming in text, selecting-copying-pasting, scanning and using websites were taught indirectly. As a result of the research, the reading comprehension success of the experimental group students in the post-test scores increased statistically significantly compared to the pre-test scores in the informative and narrative text type. According to the pre-test scores of the control group students in the informative and narrative text type, there is no statistically significant increase in the success of reading comprehension in the post-test scores. Finally, the reading comprehension scores of the experimental group students in the informative and narrative text type were significantly higher than the control group students. Therefore, the digital reading training given to the experimental group students in the research improved their digital reading comprehension skills. The education that the control group students received according to the Turkish Lesson Curriculum did not improve their digital reading comprehension skills.