Advances in research on internal and external factors that guide adolescents’ reading and learning on the Internet (Avances en la investigación de los factores internos y externos que condicionan la lectura y el aprendizaje de los adolescentes a través Internet)

Abstract

Articles in this special issue — How adolescents read and learn on the Web: internal and external factors — provide compelling new empirical evidence on a suite of internal and external factors that guide adolescents’ reading and learning from Web resources. This commentary first provides a brief overview of the findings and interpretations from each of the constituent articles. It then builds coherence amongst the findings and interpretations across the articles and in relation to the broader extant research literature. The organization differentiates which factors appear to promote and which factors appear to undermine different facets of reading and learning from Web resources. Finally, seven important future directions are discussed that emerged from analysing and synthesizing ideas presented across the articles in combination with the extant research literature. The hope is that the commentary stimulates research directions moving forward, with mindfulness towards developing conditions that support online reading for a host of different adolescent readers.