Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom.
Multitasking.
Today we present the scientific case for reading on paper instead of screens. You may have figured this out for yourself.
Markham Heid writes at Time magazine, “In the 1980s, Norway was quick to prioritize the use of computers in its classrooms. During the early 2000s, the country’s government declared the use of digital technologies a basic skill — as necessary as the ability to read, write, and do arithmetic — and for the past decade, Norwegian students have done most of their coursework on tablets and laptops. …
“Marte Blikstad-Balas, a professor in the department of teacher education and school research at the University of Oslo [says] ‘Now you see a very sharp U-turn. Especially for children in grades one to four, we’re trying to build down our digital infrastructure.’ A big reason for this reversal is the relatively poor reading performance of Norwegian students.”
Shallow reading becomes a habit.
“Despite spending more per pupil than most other countries, Norway’s students are mediocre readers. That’s according to the most recent report from the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tracks student performance in reading, math, and science around the world. Perhaps most alarmingly, a 2021 international survey found that Norway’s students ranked last among 65 countries when it came to their enjoyment of reading.
“These findings have helped fuel calls from Norwegian parents for schools to roll back the use of screen-based tools and to reprioritize old-school book reading — a trend that is also picking up steam among American parents and lawmakers. …
“Blikstad-Balas has spent much of her career studying the effects of digital technologies in classrooms. Recently, some of her research has examined screen-based reading in comparison to reading on paper. Her findings reveal some of the problems that arise when learning goes digital; they also suggest that reading something on a screen may be a fundamentally different and ‘shallower’ experience than reading on paper.
“For one recent study, she and colleagues had a small group of eighth-grade students read two short sections of text — one about a walrus, one about a beetle — of text either on a screen or on paper. The students wore eye-tracking glasses while reading, which allowed the researchers to collect data on how the students’ attention moved over the text. Reading comprehension — the students’ ability to correctly answer questions about what they’d just read — was significantly lower when the students read on screens. The researchers also found that the number of ‘transitions,’ where students would go back and re-read the text before submitting their answers, more than doubled — and in some cases tripled — when kids read on screens. …
“While this finding was unsurprising, she says it refutes some criticisms of older screen-vs.-paper reading research. ‘Some have said, well, people grow up reading on paper, not screens, so of course they’ll do better [in that medium],’ she says. ‘The children in this particular study grew up in mostly digital learning environments,’ she continues. ‘If anybody should be better at reading on screens, these kids should. And they’re not.’
“A bigger surprise came when she and her colleagues asked the students to assess their own performance. ‘They said they believed they were equally good in both conditions,’ she says. …
“How might reading on screens create comprehension shortfalls compared to reading on paper? There are two leading explanations.
“One has to do with the spatial and tactile attributes of paper-based text. When a reader has a book in their hands, for example, sentences and paragraphs are fixed in specific locations on the page and within the larger body of text. There’s evidence that the human brain finds it easier to both grasp and retain textual information when it possesses these physical properties, which screen-based texts lack. …
“The second explanation has to do with the busy, distraction-heavy nature of online information. ‘When you read things on the internet, a lot of what you’re doing is choosing what not to read and what not to look at,’ Blikstad-Balas explains. When people spend a lot of time in that kind of reading environment, they may be training themselves to skim and skip around whenever they encounter screen-based text—even when skimming and skipping is unhelpful. …
“It’s important to note that the difference in reading performance between screens and printed text is often small. ‘If it’s a 10-question test, we’ve found the difference would be something like half of a question,’ says Ladislao Salmerón, a professor at the University of Valencia in Spain who studies how digitization changes the reading experience.
“But such small differences may snowball into larger deficits. ‘Reading ability is cumulative and develops through the whole life cycle,’ he explains. ‘If every opportunity a person has to read, they’re engaging in this shallow, scanning kind of reading, their skills may never evolve to allow for comprehension of more complex ideas or syntactical structures.’ ”
More at Time, here.
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