A Preliminary Exploration of Children's Digital Reading Resource Construction in the Digital Intelligence Era: Problems, Characteristics, and Strategies

Song Yu1,2
(1. Beijing Normal University Publishing Group, Beijing 100088, China;
2. Children's Graded Reading Standards Research and Application Laboratory, China Book Distribution Association, Beijing 100088, China)

Abstract

[Objective] This paper identifies problems in the construction of children's digital reading resources, analyzes the characteristics and applications of digital reading resources, and reflects on corresponding construction strategies. [Method] Based on relevant reports, research, and practical observations, this study employs embodied cognition theory as an analytical framework to systematically review and summarize feasible strategies. [Results] The paper proposes that digital reading resources should enhance children's bodily perception, deepen the integration of knowledge and context, and expand the reading ecosystem, thereby aligning with the application direction of the digital intelligence era. [Conclusion] Publishers should adhere to correct conceptual guidance, adopt scientifically sound content design and technical methods, engage in deep cooperation with educational institutions, families, and communities, and collaborate continuously with educational technology and academic research institutions to drive innovation.

Keywords: digital reading; embodied cognition; digital resource construction; publishing digitalization; graded reading

Chinese Library Classification: G201
Document Code: A
Article ID: 1671-0134(2025)02-114-05
DOI: 10.19483/j.cnki.11-4653/n.2025.02.022

Access to resources has become increasingly diversified. The widespread adoption of digital media has broken traditional spatiotemporal constraints of reading and the physical dependence on print books, enabling children to access rich digital reading resources anytime and anywhere. Digital reading has become the primary pathway for children's reading, profoundly transforming the forms and presentation modes of reading resources. According to the 21st National Reading Survey, the contact rate for digital reading methods among minors aged 0–17 in China reached 74.7% in 2023.[1] This data reflects children's high acceptance of and dependence on digital reading resources, highlighting their importance in children's knowledge acquisition and learning lives. However, constrained by technical conditions and R&D capabilities, publishers have focused on unidirectional transmission of information and reading content, neglecting insights into the sensory experiences and bodily feelings of children at different ages. The visual presentation of screens limits children's ability to activate bodily perception during reading, resulting in the "forgotten body." Many digital platforms lack appropriate rest reminders, and reading interface designs fail to fully consider the visual requirements and operational convenience for different age groups. These issues may reduce children's interest and experience in digital reading, and even affect their health.

Traditional reading perspectives view children's reading merely as a mental activity of the brain, believing that children's rational development is achieved only through the brain while ignoring the role of the body in cognition. Current children's digital resource construction still exhibits a tendency to overemphasize the instrumental value of reading, focusing on the quantity of reading resources and test scores while prioritizing the presentation effects of technical equipment, yet neglecting children's physical and mental development status. However, reading facilities and activities in the digital intelligence era should all be oriented toward human reading experience. Publishers need to "transform from a book-centered approach to a human-centered approach"[4] and restore digital reading to children's bodily experiences.

1. Problems in Digital Reading Resource Construction

1.1 Lack of Sensory Experience: The Forgotten Body

Currently, digital reading carriers exhibit characteristics of mobility, convenience, and intelligence, while physical reading spaces gradually shrink. Publishers' unidirectional transmission of information and reading content neglects insights into the sensory experiences and bodily feelings of children at different ages. The visual presentation of screens limits children's ability to activate bodily perception during reading, leading to the "forgotten body." Many digital platforms lack appropriate rest reminders, and reading interface designs fail to fully consider the visual requirements and operational convenience for different age groups. These issues may reduce children's interest and experience in digital reading, and even affect their health.

1.2 Insufficient Situational Alignment: Detachment from Real Needs

Currently, digital reading resources are disconnected from children's actual needs and real-life situations in terms of content design. Although many publishers have achieved paper-digital integration and developed digital reading resources to accompany print books, they lack effective alignment with children's authentic contexts and existing experiences, resulting in low utilization rates and effectiveness of reading resources.

In terms of resource organization, digital reading resources typically follow the structure of print books (book-chapter-unit-section), lacking systematic planning of the overall product knowledge framework. This leads to redundant topics, duplicated resources, and chaotic content, which is not conducive to children constructing a complete and clear knowledge system and negatively impacts the personalized recommendation functions of intelligent systems. Specifically, first, due to time, manpower, and technical constraints, digital reading resources fail to fully grasp children's situations and conduct group segmentation, making it difficult to implement differentiated content layering and difficulty grading based on professional scientific grading standards, and lacking systematic reading guidance. Second, current personalized recommendation algorithms used by publishers rely heavily on keyword matching or collaborative filtering within print product structures, lacking support from systematic knowledge design and hierarchical systems for digital reading resources. This results in recommended content that often deviates from children's real needs, affecting their reading interest and effective experience. However, as intelligent digital products, publishers' digital reading resources should have a systematic and clear structure, rich educational significance and cultural value, and be significantly different from the fragmented information with internet entertainment functions and consumption orientation. Compared with the transient, scattered, fragmented, and superficial characteristics of online information, digital reading resources should help children engage in deep reading, form good knowledge structures, and achieve knowledge transfer across different contexts.

1.3 Fragmented Ecosystem: Imbalanced Collaborative Resource Development

Imbalanced collaborative resource development represents a bottleneck in publishers' construction of children's digital reading resources. Developing children's digital reading resources requires cooperation among families, schools, libraries, and other cultural institutions to build an ecosystem supporting children's digital reading. However, current stakeholders have failed to achieve organic coordination in content development, technical support, and resource allocation, making it difficult to make effective adjustments based on children's actual situations or provide a unified support system to ensure children's digital reading effectiveness across different environments. Additionally, uneven technical infrastructure—such as insufficient network coverage, lack of electronic hardware, and smart reading facilities—also constrains the popularization of digital reading resources, limiting children's access to and utilization of these resources. This not only affects some children's opportunities to access high-quality reading resources but also hinders the cultivation of their digital reading habits and the improvement of their digital reading literacy.

2. Characteristics of Children's Digital Reading Resources from the Embodied Cognition Perspective

Embodied cognition theory challenges the mind-body dualism assumption of first-generation cognitive science, arguing that cognition is not an independent information processing activity of the brain but an activity embedded in the body and environment, continuously emerging and developing through interactions among the brain, body, and environment.[5] The essence of digital reading is a cognitive behavior that deeply participates in and influences the reading practice and meaning construction process. Nowadays, with the advancement of intelligent devices and immersive perception technologies, digital reading resources are intervening in children's reading in unprecedented ways, emphasizing the importance of enhanced bodily perception, deepened contextual integration, and expanded ecological environments in digital reading. This provides a feasible exploration direction for digital reading resource construction.

2.1 Embodiment: Sensory Engagement and Experience Enhancement

Embodied cognition theory holds that cognition is directly linked to bodily experience. The body is not merely a physiological "objective entity" but also a living "phenomenal body" that experiences the world through touch, vision, smell, and hearing.[6] The physical properties of the body directly influence cognition, determining the processes of thinking and mind, and constitute the physiological foundation for children to understand the world.

Attention attraction is the prerequisite for digital reading.[7] Therefore, digital reading resources should actively adapt to mobile and intelligent reading trends, fully leveraging the interactive advantages of digital platforms. Through multimodal design that integrates multiple sensory experiences and bodily actions, reading content can be transformed from static text or images into a series of dynamic sensory experiences, "forming a multi-channel perceptual reading field."[8] This enables children to gain immersive feelings during reading, transforming reading from a purely textual cognitive activity into a whole-body-and-mind experience, thereby influencing the development of their cognitive abilities through bodily experiences.

With the aid of intelligent recommendation technology, digital reading resources can integrate children's reading interaction data (such as reading speed and dwell time) to identify and assess their emotional states and cognitive needs, and based on this, change real environmental factors or simulate authentic situations—such as adjusting font size, screen brightness, or creating scenarios—thereby influencing children's bodily sensations and motor experiences and strengthening the physical connection between children and reading content. Children's bodily behaviors and sensory experiences thus become key evidence for personalized digital reading and important references for macro-level decision-making. Digital reading resources are not merely media for knowledge transmission but also participants and facilitators in children's bodily experiences and cognitive development.

2.2 Situatedness: Knowledge Construction and Emotional Integration

Embodied cognition theory posits that perceptual experiences generated through body-environment interactions are the initiators and arenas of cognition.[9] Situatedness, as one of the core features of embodied cognition theory, encompasses not only physical environments and bodily structures but also broad aspects such as socio-historical-cultural backgrounds, language, and knowledge products.[10] Therefore, as individuals grow, they gradually absorb and internalize rules and cultures in specific contexts, continuously forming part of their own cognitive systems, thereby tightly integrating cognition and action to achieve "unity of knowledge and action."

Digital reading resources organically integrate contextual elements such as children's life situations, natural phenomena in the physical world, and social environments and cultural customs through multimodal and virtual reality technologies. Based on children's physical and mental development and reading abilities, they construct knowledge frameworks and socio-cultural references "centered on major themes, big concepts, and related key contexts"[11] that support children's cognitive development. This knowledge system framework serves as the support system and external presentation of knowledge contexts, containing socio-historical-cultural concepts, knowledge technologies, and scientific achievements under the era's development, providing rich materials and manifestations for contextual representation. Children can then understand reading content in more intuitive and vivid ways, combining abstract concepts with existing experiences and specific contexts to better achieve knowledge transfer.

The essence of digital reading resources is reading content that embodies people's cultural-historical experiences and social values, conveying aesthetic implications and artistic sensibilities while reflecting and inheriting social culture.[12] Children grow up immersed in social culture. Through reading specific information and knowledge, they can establish deep connections with cultural traditions at the emotional level, evoke bodily experiences, trigger deep emotional resonance, and enhance their perception and identification with Chinese culture. Digital reading resources thus cover extensive domains ranging from basic language knowledge and common sense to complex scientific principles and humanistic ideas, involving not only the improvement of reading skills and expansion of thinking abilities but also the gradual shaping of positive values. By creating knowledge contexts that dynamically match children's needs and growth requirements, digital reading resources provide children with a spiral ascending path of reading development.

2.3 Generativity: Dynamic Construction and Ecological Integration

Embodied cognition theory views cognitive activity as a dynamically generative process. The generativity of cognition is rooted in contexts and continuously emerges through dynamic exchanges and collisions among the brain, body, and context.[13] It constantly changes and develops as new experiences are generated between individuals and contexts.

Through human-computer collaborative dialogue mechanisms supported by generative artificial intelligence, digital reading resources assist in answering children's questions during reading comprehension, enabling real-time feedback and dynamic adjustment of children's cognitive processes. In this process, children are not merely recipients of knowledge but active participants in knowledge construction. Through interaction with digital reading resources, children can continuously generate new experiences through bodily movements, sensory experiences, and emotional investment, forming personalized cognitive structures highly integrated with systematic knowledge. While integrating new information into contexts, children can engage in active construction and reflection, re-evaluating and adjusting existing cognitive frameworks to form more flexible and profound knowledge understanding, ultimately achieving knowledge transfer across different contexts.

The generativity of digital reading resources acts not only on individual children's reading but also manifests in the processes of interaction, sharing, and joint participation among children. Digital reading resources support children in sharing reading experiences, provide teachers and parents with objective data and analysis reports on children's reading processes and results, and offer highly targeted reading plans and guidance schemes. This assists important others in children's lives—such as teachers and parents—in systematically conducting reading education in real-life contexts, helping children achieve collaborative knowledge construction within their "zone of proximal development." Beijing Normal University's "Jingshi Reading" digital platform, relying on book and curriculum resources combined with comprehensive supervision and data management mechanisms, enables teachers and parents to comprehensively understand children's complete reading behaviors, reading effectiveness, and their own growth and change data, achieving home-school co-education. It also cooperates with a professional and comprehensive training system to provide integrated home-school reading services.

3. Construction Paths for Children's Digital Reading Resources

Embodied cognition theory emphasizes that cognition depends not only on brain thinking but also on sensory experiences, bodily movements, and contextual interactions. Therefore, digital reading resource construction should start from the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education, be based on the core competency requirements of basic education, be child-centered, emphasize the principles of "bodily return - contextual diversity - interactive generation," adhere to correct conceptual guidance, respect children's physical and mental development laws, scientifically grade reading resources, collaborate with multiple stakeholders, build a sound digital reading ecosystem, and promote the effective improvement of children's reading abilities and core competencies.

3.1 Return to the Body: Adhering to Correct Conceptual Guidance

Regardless of how reading forms and scenarios change, the essence of reading remains content. Children's digital reading resources should start from the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education, follow the requirements of textbook construction, ensure that resources promote children's comprehensive development in ideological understanding, knowledge skills, and emotional values, uphold the guiding position of Marxism, reflect the demands of Marxism's sinicization and modernization, embody Chinese and national styles, represent the basic requirements of the Party and state for education, reflect national and ethnic fundamental values, reflect the accumulation and innovative achievements of human cultural knowledge, deeply explore content that fully embodies the excellent traditional Chinese culture and advanced socialist culture, and cultivate children's patriotic feelings and profound identification with Chinese culture.[14]

In terms of content, digital reading resources should respect children's physical and mental development conditions and cognitive needs, comprehensively cover various subject themes, grasp basic education curriculum standards, rationally allocate text types and presentation modalities, achieve organic integration and connection across disciplines, conform to objective facts and scientific principles, and incorporate content on morality, aesthetics, labor consciousness, and social responsibility to guide children in establishing correct values.

After more than a decade of paper-digital integration development in the publishing industry, this is not merely a simple superposition of technology and content but an innovation and upgrade of contemporary reading education concepts—an important path that conforms to children's physical and mental development laws and adapts to digital reading education trends. Research shows that paper reading can promote neural connection and regeneration to better consolidate memory, while digital reading activates neural connections and generation to improve learning and output capabilities.[15] Therefore, publishers should actively promote integrated paper-digital design, fully leverage the respective advantages of paper and digital resources to achieve their synergistic complementarity and deep integration, and continuously advance the high-quality development of digitalization, networking, and intelligence in publishing. On this basis, digital reading resources should fully exploit the advantages of being unitized, specialized, and clustered, presenting a three-dimensional, systematic, and scientific organizational form. They should adopt multimodal design to link and reorganize static knowledge content with dynamic and diverse digital resources such as music, graphics, videos, and haptic feedback, enhance interactive functions and feedback mechanisms, and timely update content in conjunction with China's new scientific and technological achievements and social hot issues to ensure that digital reading resources always keep pace with the times and satisfy children's thirst for new knowledge.

3.2 Design Situations: Building a Dynamic Grading System

The digital intelligence era demands "cultivating comprehensive innovative talents with digital literacy and complex problem-solving abilities needed by the digital society,"[16] which points to the cultivation of children's core competencies. Digital reading resources should adhere to the child-centered principle, respect children's physical and mental development laws, fully recognize their differences in cognitive development, sensory experiences, reading abilities, and cultural backgrounds, follow the graded reading concept, design resource content and forms that meet the needs of different child groups, establish a reasonable and scientific digital reading grading system, and ensure the effectiveness and appropriateness of reading resources.

Graded reading is an important pathway to realize the child-centered concept, a key basis for planning and goal-setting in children's digital reading resource development, and the foundation for enabling children to independently choose reading resources and obtain dynamic reading resource services through big data analysis. Its essence is the "dynamic matching between children's book grading and children's reading ability grading."[17] Publishers should combine social concepts, knowledge technologies, and scientific achievements with educational goals of "what kind of people to cultivate," design modular and systematic grading, layering, and classification systems based on children's cognitive characteristics, reading abilities, cultural environments, and interest preferences, and build differentiated content matching mechanisms that satisfy children's personalized dynamic needs and enable them to gradually master required knowledge, skills, and values.

Children are unique reading subjects with varying reading interests, abilities, and needs. Children in the same age group have different reading levels and preferences, and the same child's reading ability, interest, and needs change with age, reading preferences, and external contexts. The widespread application of big data technology and intelligent reading devices can accurately perceive and analyze information on children's cognitive abilities, interests, reading needs, and cultural backgrounds. Digital reading resources should combine the graded reading concept, use technology to collect and analyze children's reading behaviors, facial expressions, eye movement data, and motion feedback, apply intelligent recommendation algorithms to dynamically adjust reading resource themes, language difficulty, presentation forms, and resource recommendation services, establish effective and timely feedback mechanisms, ensure content timeliness and relevance, and achieve intelligent supply of reading resources and precise matching with children's reading needs.

3.3 Collaborative Symbiosis: Building a Sound Ecosystem

Children's digital reading resource construction should focus on building a complete online-offline hybrid digital reading ecosystem, achieving interactive synergy effects among different stakeholders through resource sharing and technological innovation, and forming positive interaction and feedback mechanisms. Publishers must recognize their role in promoting the development of educational technology and cultural industries, serve the overall interests of education and publishing, actively fulfill social responsibilities, and continuously enhance the influence of knowledge services. They should deeply understand the needs of children, parents, teachers, and other groups for high-quality reading resources, create collaborative mechanisms that combine online digital resources with offline reading activities, provide children with continuous reading environments and systematic guidance, expand the boundaries of reading education, and cultivate a positive reading ecology. Based on local culture and specific educational needs, they should develop customized digital reading resources and provide corresponding reading instruction services.

In practice, Beijing Normal University Publishing Group has established a close cooperative relationship with Anhui Xinhua Media Co., Ltd., successfully promoting the jointly created "Beautiful Reading" series of products and services to multiple prefecture-level cities and counties across the province, successfully building a distinctive brand image.

Big data, intelligent knowledge graphs, intelligent search of reading resources, and personalized information flow push technologies have brought new opportunities and challenges to digital reading resource construction. Publishers should establish partnerships with educational institutions, technology companies, universities, and research institutions to deeply explore the integration and innovation of children's digital reading resources, advance the combination of digital reading theory and practice, and inject high-quality innovative momentum into reading resource construction and digital transformation. Simultaneously, they should improve the management mechanisms of digital reading resources to ensure that resource content and forms are legally compliant and safely and accurately delivered to children. Additionally, when planning digital resources, publishers should consider children's access to digital reading resources under different regional and economic backgrounds. Through policy support and local cooperation projects, publishers can lower resource access barriers, contribute to improving the popularization rate of digital resources, and enable more children to benefit from high-quality digital reading resources.

Children's digital reading resource construction is a complex systematic project that requires comprehensive consideration of children's physical and mental development laws, knowledge content design, and intelligent technology application. From the perspective of embodied cognition, publishers should deeply understand children's cognitive needs and bodily experiences, emphasize the embodiment, situatedness, and generativity of digital reading resources, adhere to correct conceptual guidance, adopt scientifically sound content design and technical methods, engage in deep cooperation with education, families, and communities, and collaborate continuously with educational technology and academic research institutions to provide children with appropriate digital reading resources, create a sound digital reading ecosystem, promote the development of their digital reading abilities and core competencies, and advance the deep digital transformation and upgrading of publishers.

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Author Biography: Song Yu (1988—), female, Beijing, master's degree, intermediate publishing professional, research direction: editing and publishing.

(Responsible Editor: Li Jing)