If students become aware of this illusion, they can make better choices. “They assume that because they were going faster, they understood it better,” Alexander observes. Research by Alexander and others has confirmed this faster pace. On top of that, we all could do with a lot more self-awareness about how we learn from reading.įor 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. And what kind of readers? What age? What kind of text are we talking about? All of those elements matter a great deal.” “The core question,” Alexander said in an interview, is “when is a reader best served by a particular medium. We all swim in a sea of electronic information and there’s no turning back the tide. The point of such research, as Alexander herself notes, is not to anoint a winner in a contest between digital and print. Researchers call this failure of insight poor “calibration.” In fact, after answering comprehension questions, 69% said they believed they had performed better after reading on a computer. 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.Ĭuriously, the students themselves were unaware of this advantage.

Due to the length, no scrolling was required, but there still was a difference in how much they absorbed. In a 2016 experiment they asked 90 undergraduates to read short informational texts (about 450 words) on a computer and in print. Of 878 potentially relevant studies published between 19, only 36 directly compared reading in digital to reading in print, and measured learning in a reliable way.Īlexander and Singer have done their own studies of the digital versus print question. 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). There may be differences in the concentration we bring to a digital environment, too, where we are accustomed to browsing and multitasking. 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. The finding was supported by numerous studies and held true for students in college, high school and grade school. 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.

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