Embedded Files
As we continue to integrate 1:1 technology in our classrooms, you may be hearing from your children that much of their reading and research is still taking place using print texts. There are two main reasons for this:
Researchers are engaged in quite a bit of research on digital comprehension, specifically whether or not reading digital texts - either using an e-reader or reading articles online - helps or hinders comprehension. So far, the bulk of research indicates the latter - comprehension suffers when reading online, especially when there is a need to scroll through content.
By the time students are ready to transition from 5th to 6th grade, they must be skilled with annotating. This means marking up text by underlining, highlighting, and writing in the margins in order to read closely and enhance understanding. This work is best done with print texts rather than digital at the intermediate level.
Research on Print vs. Digital Reading
Research on Print vs. Digital Reading
Business Insider Article on Why Comprehension Suffers When Reading Digital Text:
Summary of Additional Research Studies:
Digital or Print: Which Is Better for Comprehension and Note-Taking?
Digital or Print: Which Is Better for Comprehension and Note-Taking?
In this article in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey (San Diego State University and Health Sciences High and Middle College) summarize three studies comparing digital and hard-copy reading and note-taking.
• Singer and Alexander (2017) – This review of 36 empirical studies compared reading comprehension among both middle-school and college students. One finding was that when the length of a reading passage didn’t require scrolling on a digital device, students’ reading comprehension was the same. With longer passages, students who read paper texts did better. The study also found that students reading print material did better on questions that asked for more-detailed and nuanced information.
• Mangen, Walgermo, and Bronnick (2013) – The researchers had Norwegian tenth graders read online or hard-copy narratives and informational passages of about 1,500 words and found that students who read in hard copy did better on comprehension. The researchers had two theories. First, they speculated that hard-copy texts provide readers with “unequivocal and fixed spatial cues for text memory and recall… [T]he absence of touch and physical handling of the pages of the digital form of the articles may have ‘disrupted the mental maps of the text…’” The authors speculated that students reading online articles were overconfident in predicting their performance, compared to those who read hard copies. Paper texts seemed to involve “more effortful learning” in contrast to the “fast and shallow reading” of digital material.
• Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014) – This study compared laptop to hand-written note-taking in college classes. The researchers found that laptop note-takers got more words down, often verbatim phrases and sentences from the content. By contrast, longhand note-takers wrote fewer words but did more paraphrasing, capturing material at a more conceptual level. Tested 30 minutes afterward, both groups did comparably on factual items, but the longhand note-takers did significantly better on conceptual questions. In a second study with different participants, laptop note-takers were urged to take conceptual versus transcription-type notes, but this made no difference to the kind of notes they took, and they still did less well on conceptual questions than longhand note-takers.
Mueller and Oppenheimer conducted a third experiment (with different participants), this time testing students on factual and conceptual content a week later on the material they’d heard and taken notes on. They divided students into four groups:
- Laptop note-takers not allowed to study their notes before the test;
- Laptop note-takers allowed to look at their notes;
- Longhand note-takers not allowed to study their notes;
- Longhand note-takers allowed to study their notes.
The first three groups all performed poorly on the test. Only the group that took longhand notes and then studied them did well. “Longhand notes,” conclude Fisher and Frey, “appear to require the learner to process the information, making decisions about what information is most important, synthesizing, and putting concepts into their own words. All of these are critical thinking skills that are indicators of learning.”
“Reading and Writing on Screen and Paper” by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey in Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, November/December 2018 (Vol. 62, #3, p. 349-351),
https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jaal.901; the authors can be reached at dfisher@mail.sdsu.eduand nfrey@sdsu.edu.
Report abuse