Supporting data for "Chinese Multimodal Reading Comprehension in a Hypertext Environment: Measurement and its Antecedents"

This study focuses on the measurement of students’ multimodal reading performance, as well as exploring the reader factors and textual factors that influence students’ multimodal reading performance. To measure multimodal reading performance and the impact of students’ cognitive skills, a quantitative research design was employed. To assess the influence of textual factors—specifically, the role of different modalities and image-text relationships in multimodal reading—a qualitative research design was utilized.

The quantitative research dataset contains variables such as multimodal reading performance, word decoding, linguistic comprehension, image comprehension, inference, and prior knowledge. From the participants, who were fourth-grade students in Hong Kong, a total of 282 responses were collected, out of which 251 were valid.

The qualitative study data consists of 25 audio recordings from semi-structured interviews with 40 fourth-grade students. The interviews aimed to understand the roles of images and text, as well as the image-text relationships, in the students’ multimodal reading comprehension. The questions involved are as follows: (1) Do you prefer to read text, pictures, or a combination of text and pictures? Why? (2) How do the text and/or pictures help your understanding of the reading material? (3) How do you integrate text and pictures? (4) How does the integration of text and pictures help you understand the reading material? (5) There are three image-text relationships here (illustration, elaboration, and extension); which one do you find easiest to understand? Which is the most challenging? Why?