Text comprehension is an essential skill for academic success and participation in social life. In Italy, although average student performance is in line with that of OECD countries, significant disparities linked to socio-economic background persist, undermining equity and access to learning opportunities.

The evolution of reading contexts—now increasingly digital and multimodal—has broadened the concept of literacy. Digital literacy involves the ability to understand, integrate, and communicate information from various sources. In texts available on different media, it remains essential to generate correct inferences that are consistent with the meaning of the surrounding co-text. Therefore, teaching that supports comprehension must focus on fostering the reader’s active and critical engagement. There is an urgent need to develop instructional protocols to support teachers in helping their students become critical readers and active citizens, capable of approaching digital texts with effective strategies.

From these premises arises the PRIN project (Progetto di Ricerca di Interesse Nazionale, funded by the European Union), Fostering text comprehension as a way to make learning and thinking visible, which experimented with and compared innovative teaching models to support the comprehension of printed texts, digital texts, and texts accompanied by a creative board game, offered as individual or pair work. The project's objective was to validate strategic and replicable teaching protocols that could be applied in everyday school practice.

The overall experimentation involved 423 pupils and 25 teachers from 22 fourth-grade primary school classes across six comprehensive schools in Northern Italy. Coordinated by the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and University of Parma, the program included 12 sessions conducted by researchers. In each session, for the classes working with paper-based and digital texts, a narrative text was addressed, with inferential questions inserted at particularly challenging points.

This contribution presents some results from the classes that worked with digital texts. These classes used a digital platform developed in a Moodle environment, accessed by the children on school-provided laptops. The platform was not limited to delivering texts but served as an interactive learning environment. Students could go back and revise their answers, thereby training metacognitive and monitoring strategies, supporting self-assessment and awareness of their own comprehension. At the end of each session, a group discussion was held, coordinated by the teacher, providing feedback.

The analysis of average scores shows a significant improvement in oral comprehension in the digital group (+1.09), while the control group remained stable (−0.04). The digital group, which started with a lower average score (5.97 vs 6.78), surpassed the control group in the post-test (7.06 vs 6.74). Correlations with the CO-TT test (Oral Comprehension – Test and Treatment), which assessed students’ comprehension after listening only to the teacher’s reading, indicate that the digital intervention improved oral comprehension, proving particularly effective for students with initially lower performance levels.

Keywords: Digital texts, reading comprehension, inferencing, awareness, interactive environment.