‘There’s No Easy Answer’

A scholarly report states students may not comprehend complex text in a digital format as well as in
print. Other educators argue both formats have value.

By Sharon O'Malley

August 16, 2017

When Lauren Singer, a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, was a student teacher, she
observed a kindergarten class as the children learned how to read “like you and I did.” Then their
teacher told them to read silently for a while and handed each student an iPad.

“It blew my mind,” Singer recalled. “They were being taught the same, but given a different thing to
read.”

Singer’s notion -- then and now -- is that reading a computer screen requires a different set of skills than
reading on paper. “I hope in the future, we have a clearer understanding of what students are doing
differently when they are reading digitally,” she said. “It’s not taught as if it’s different.”

In a review of educational research published by SAGE Journals in July, Singer and University of
Maryland professor Patricia Alexander discovered that readers may not comprehend complex or lengthy
material as well when they view it digitally as when they read it on paper. While they concluded with a
call for more research, the pair wrote, “It is fair to say that reading digitally is part and parcel of living
and learning in the 21st century … No matter how complex the question of reading across mediums may
be, teachers and students must understand how and when to employ a digital reading device.”

In an interview with “Inside Digital Learning,” Singer confirmed, “Digital devices aren’t going anywhere.
This no longer is a question of, ‘Will the digital device be in your classroom?’ but ‘What do we know
about the digital device, and how can we make this equal to print?’”
Singer, who is studying human development and quantitative methodology, suggested that professors
should teach students -- who learned to read printed, not digital, material when they were children --
“how to navigate the readings.”

For example, she said instructors should take the time to show students how to annotate a PDF and
make them aware that most people read more quickly on a screen than in print and therefore could lose
some comprehension. She also suggested that teachers ask students to answer, in one sentence, what
the overall point of the text was every time they read a chapter or an article online.

More importantly, she said, is for professors to determine which kinds of readings are suitable for digital
delivery. “Sometimes students only need to get the main idea,” Singer said, “and then digital is just as
good as print and a lot quicker … But if you want deep comprehension and synthesis of the material,
have the students print it out and navigate the material that way. Think about what you want students
to get out of a lesson” before assigning a printed or digital reading.

Students Should Choose

An English professor, Wayne Kobylinski, said his Anne Arundel Community College students in Maryland
choose for themselves. “For the most part, the students opt to get the print versions” of novels and
textbooks for his class, Kobylinski said. “If someone says, ‘Can I use the ebook?’ I say that’s fine.”

Kobylinski said his students feel printed material “carries more of a sense of gravitas” than digital. “That
makes sense for college students.”

He explained that because students spend so much time reading online communications on social media,
where writing is casual, they figure, “If I use electronic writing for informal things, then electronic writing
is inherently informal, so it’s not as important … They can skip it.”

Professor Jody Donovan, who teaches in Colorado State University’s school of education, said her
graduate students overwhelmingly prefer “everything electronic. They don’t want a hard copy of
anything, and our faculty always wants both.”
Donovan has observed that her online students tend to refer to the digital readings more frequently
than those in her face-to-face classes refer to the print versions. “Having it online allows them to read it
multiple times, whereas I often see if it’s printed, students will read it once and be done with it.

“Does that mean comprehension is better because it’s in print and they only need to refer to it once? I
don’t know.”

Donovan added, “I do agree that we’ve got to figure this out … because it isn’t going away, for sure, for
lots of reasons: accessibility, cost, sustainability. We have to figure out how we can support students in
comprehending from this format.”

“There’s no easy answer,” said Lance Eaton, an instructional designer at Brandeis University. But he said
he believes “we can still get as much meaning out of digital text. We just haven’t found the right
transitions to do what we actually do with a physical book, with digital text … We haven’t found the
digital equivalent of interacting with text. We haven’t really trained people to do that.”

https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/08/16/which-better-reading-print-or-
screen

Digital or paper?

Do we learn better from printed books than digital versions? The answer from researchers is a qualified
yes

Photo of Claudia Wallis

The Science of Learning

Column by CLAUDIA WALLIS August 23, 2017

My friend Joanne was packing her youngest child off to college this month and wrestling with a modern
dilemma: Is it better to buy textbooks in digital form or old-fashioned print? One of her son’s professors
was recommending an online text for a business course: lighter, always accessible and seriously cheaper
($88 vs. $176 for a 164-page book). But Joanne’s instinct was that her son would “learn better” from a
printed volume, free of online distractions, and with pages he could dog-ear, peruse in any order, and
inscribe with marginal notes. Her son was inclined to agree.

Research suggests that students retain more details when studying from printed text rather than a
screen. Credit: Hero Images

Many of us book lovers cherish the tactile qualities of print, but some of this preference is emotional or
nostalgic. Do reading and note-taking on paper offer any measurable advantages for learning? Given the
high cost of hard-backed textbooks, is it wiser to save the money and the back strain by going digital?

You might think that, decades into the digital revolution, we would have a clear answer to this question.
Wrong. Earlier this year educational psychologist Patricia Alexander, a literacy scholar at the University
of Maryland, published a thorough review of recent research on the topic. She was “shocked,” she says,
to find that out of 878 potentially relevant studies published between 1992 and 2017, only 36 directly
compared reading in digital and in print and measured learning in a reliable way. (Many of the other
studies zoomed in on aspects of e-reading, such as eye movements or the merits of different kinds of
screens.)

KQED

This story also appeared in KQED

Aside from pointing up a blatant need for more research, Alexander’s review, co-authored with doctoral
student Lauren Singer and appearing in Review of Educational Research, affirmed at least one practical
finding: if you are reading something lengthy – more than 500 words or more than a page of the book
or screen – your comprehension will likely take a hit if you’re using a digital device. The finding was
supported by numerous studies and held true for students in college, high school and grade school.

Research suggests that the explanation is at least partly the greater physical and mental demands of
reading on a screen: the nuisance of scrolling, and the tiresome glare and flicker of some devices. There
may be differences in the concentration we bring to a digital environment, too, where we are
accustomed to browsing and multitasking. And some researchers have observed that working your way
through a print volume leaves spatial impressions that stick in your mind (for instance, the lingering
memory of where a certain passage or diagram appeared in a book).

ADVERTISEMENT

Of 878 potentially relevant studies published between 1992 and 2017, only 36 directly compared
reading in digital to reading in print, and measured learning in a reliable way.

Alexander and Singer have done their own studies of the digital versus print question. In a 2016
experiment they asked 90 undergraduates to read short informational texts (about 450 words) on a
computer and in print. Due to the length, no scrolling was required, but there still was a difference in
how much they absorbed. The students performed equally well in describing the main idea of the
passages no matter the medium, but when asked to list additional key points and recall further details,
the print readers had the edge.

Curiously, the students themselves were unaware of this advantage. In fact, after answering
comprehension questions, 69% said they believed they had performed better after reading on a
computer. Researchers call this failure of insight poor “calibration.”

The point of such research, as Alexander herself notes, is not to anoint a winner in a contest between
digital and print. We all swim in a sea of electronic information and there’s no turning back the tide.

“The core question,” Alexander said in an interview, is “when is a reader best served by a particular
medium. And what kind of readers? What age? What kind of text are we talking about? All of those
elements matter a great deal.”

On top of that, we all could do with a lot more self-awareness about how we learn from reading.

For example, a big reason that students in the study thought they learned better from digital text is that
they moved more quickly in that medium. Research by Alexander and others has confirmed this faster
pace. “They assume that because they were going faster, they understood it better,” Alexander
observes. “It’s an illusion.”

If students become aware of this illusion, they can make better choices. Just as they might decide to
turn off social media alerts while studying an online textbook, they might want to consciously slow
themselves down when reading for deep meaning. On the other hand, when reading for pleasure or
surface information, they can let ’er rip.

Digital text makes it easy for students to copy and paste key passages into a document for further study,
but there is little research on how this compares with taking notes by hand.

“They assume that because they were going faster [reading digitally], they understood it better. It’s an
illusion.”

Patricia Alexander, literacy scholar at the University of Maryland

“We study things like highlighting and underlining,” Alexander says, “but those kind of motor responses
have never been of highest value in terms of text-processing strategies” – whether done with a cursor or
a marker. The studying strategy with “the greatest power,” she adds, involves deeply questioning the
text — asking yourself if you agree with the author, and why or why not.

Dutch scholar Joost Kircz points out that these are still early days for digital reading, and new and better
formats will continue to emerge. In his view, the linear format of a traditional book is well suited for
narratives but not necessarily ideal for academic texts or scientific papers.

“In narrative prose fiction, the author strictly determines the reading path,” he and co-author August
Hans Den Boef write in The Unbound Book, a collection of essays about the future of reading. “But in a
digital environment we can easily enable a plurality of reading paths in educational and scholarly texts.”

In addition to the hyperlinks, video and audio that currently enhance many digital texts, Kircz would like
to see innovations such as multiple types of hyperlinks, perhaps in a rainbow of colors that denote
specific purposes (annotation, elaboration, contrary views, media, etc.). He also imagines digital books
that could enable a variety of paths through a body of work. Not all information is linear or even layered,
he told me: “There’s a lot of information that’s spherical. You cannot stack it up. The question is to what
extent can we mimic human understanding?”

While we await those future digital products, students deciding what school books to buy this fall would
do well to ask themselves just what they hope to get from the text. As Alexander notes, “If I’m only
trying to learn something that’s going to be covered on a test and the test is shallow in nature, then
[digital] is just fine.” If, on the other hand, you hope to dive in deeply and gather imperishable pearls,
spring for the book.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, the nonprofit, independent news website focused on
inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletter.

hechingerreport.org/textbook-dilemma-digital-paper/