List Volume 21Number 2 publication date:Sep. 2008 Back Integrating Digital Storybooks into Teaching to Promote Children’s Cognitive Concepts of Animal Growth     Author:Chow-Chin Lu & Yueh-Yun Chen Research Article Download In order to assist school-children in learning descriptive concepts of animal growth, the researchers compiled seven digital storybooks in CD-ROM form, and integrated them into “Water Creatures” and “Insects on Campus” units in the elementary school science curriculum. Quasi-experimental design was implemented with two instruments to describe students’ concept growth: “Achievement Test of Animal Curriculum (ATAC)” and “Open Questionnaires of Descriptive Concepts (OQDC)”. Results indicated that the sixty-five fourth-graders in experimental group who were taught with digital storybooks had better achievement in ATAC and OQDC than the sixty-five students in control group who were taught with traditional narration instruction. Results from OQDC, students’ self-made illustrated booklets, classroom observations, and teachers’ reflection diary showed that the control group students could only described simple animal concepts according to the lines of the textbooks and network materials, but the experimental group students were more capable of thorough descriptions of animal growth in their own words through observing and imitating the animated characters in the digital storybooks. This research implies that digital storybooks integrated into teaching as an alternative teaching method can provide science teachers with multimedia resources. Science teachers are free to copy the digital storybooks designed by the authors for students to use so that students can study with it in classroom and learn the concept by themselves at home. Keywords: animal growth knowledge, descriptive concepts, digital storybooks integrated into teaching The Practice and Reflection of School-Based Teacher Evaluation