With the increasing amount of time children spend on reading electronic media, cultivating children with good digital reading abilities and promoting digital reading comprehension are becoming more and more important in the digital age. To enhance digital reading performance, this work presents a collaborative reading annotation system with reading annotation and interactive discussion scaffolding (CRAS-RAIDS) to facilitate reading performance in collaborative digital reading environments. Based on quasi-experimental design, this work recruits 53 Grade 5 students in two classes at an elementary school in Taiwan. One of the two classes is randomly assigned as the experimental group that performs collaborative reading with the proposed CRAS-RAIDS support and the remaining class is randomly assigned to the control group that performs collaborative reading with traditional paper-based reading annotation and face-to-face discussion. This work examines the differences between both groups in reading comprehension, and reading strategy use in an active reading context. Analytical results show that the experimental group presents significant superiority on direct and explicit comprehension performance, inferential comprehension performance, and reading strategy use as compared to the control group.
