How Digital Textbooks Affect Primary and Secondary Students’ Learning Outcomes from an International Perspective——A Meta-Analysis Based on 35 Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Studies

As the fundamental resource and carrier for instructional activities in digital contexts, digital textbooks have yielded inconsistent conclusions regarding their effectiveness in existing research. To address this gap, the paper conducted a meta-analysis of 35 global experimental and quasi-experimental studies focusing on basic education. The results demonstrated that digital textbooks had a moderate positive effect on learners’ cognitive performance, skill performance, and affective attitudes. Such effects were moderated by factors such as instructional model, intervention duration, educational stage, and subject area, while textbook type showed no moderating influence. In this paper, it was proposed that the development of digital textbooks should strengthen instructional embedding and disciplinary adaptability, establish an interdisciplinary collaborative textbook research and development mechanism, optimize the role positioning of teachers and students, and form a regular classroom application model for digital textbooks. These measures can facilitate the deep integration of technology and pedagogy, and boost the high-quality development of education.