Is book reading always best? Children learn and transfer complex scientific explanations from books or animations

Background Storybooks are an effective tool for teaching complex scientific mechanisms to young children when presented in child-friendly, joint-attentional contexts like read-aloud sessions. However, static storybooks are limited in their ability to convey change across time and, relative to animated storybooks, are harder to disseminate to a wide audience. This study examined second graders’ abilities to learn the deeply counterintuitive concepts of adaptation and speciation from multi-day interventions centered around two storybooks about natural selection that were either read-aloud (static) or watched on a screen (animated). The storybook sequence was progressive and first explained—in counter-essentialist and non-teleological terms—how the relative distribution of a terrestrial mammal’s trait changed over time due to behavioral shifts in their primary food resource (adaptation, book 1). It then explained how–after a sub-population of this species became geographically isolated–they evolved into an entirely different aquatic species over many generations via selection on multiple foraging-relevant traits (speciation, book 2). The animated and static versions of the storybooks used the same text and illustrations, but while the animations lacked joint-attentional context, they more dynamically depicted successive reproductive generations. Storybook and animation presentations were interspersed with five parallel talk-aloud assessment interviews over three days. Results Findings revealed substantial learning from the read-aloud static storybook sequence. They also revealed substantial learning from the animation condition with patterns suggesting that the dynamic representations of change over time particularly scaffolded acquisition of the deeply counterintuitive idea that a species can evolve into an entirely different category of species by natural selection. Conclusions The results provide much-needed optimism in a context of increasing demands for scalable solutions to promote effective learning: animated storybooks are just as good (and may even be better) than static storybooks.