A groundbreaking study shows kids learn better on paper, not screens. Now what? | Hacker News Reader

A groundbreaking study shows kids learn better on paper, not screens. Now what?

theguardian.com

51 pointsjimnotgym19 comments

> These findings provide evidence of differences in brain responses to texts presented in print and digital media, including deeper semantic encoding for print than digital texts.

I wonder if the effect diminishes if the digital media is more like paper, as with e-readers, or if it is due to other differences like scrolling versus page turning.

Interesting, I have a kindle paperwhite and I much prefer real books, especially for non fiction. I don't know why though, I have no inkling of what it is I find better.

It’s still a screen

My hunch is that it's the spatial relationship of scanning or turning left and right with a physical object.

After years of taking notes in paper and e-ink and keyboard, I love paper because of the spaced repetition that's forced when I'm scanning back for old entries in a notebook. It is probably the root of all my memorization and free association.

Whether I'm "bookmarking" e books or trying to do clumsy search for old entries, I think I pick up a lot just by seeing the notes again by accident, feeling the page, or something else. Can't say but it's nowhere close for me with electric media.

I don't share this take. If it isn't in my digital notes it may as well not exist. When I write with a digital pen it is much better. I also tend to write more useful information since I'm not worrier about space. When reviewing it is useful to have easy access to multiple colors, so I can express things more easily.

But you're not responding to the claim (or claims) being made.

The main claim is that digital media remove the spatial element from the picture, making it more difficult to remember things. This isn't a crazy notion. Think of the method of loci[0] which explicitly uses an imaginary space to "keep" information for later recall. This must be, because spatial association is something useful for navigating spatial environments, so if you cannot lean on that to reinforce memory and recall, then you're at a greater disadvantage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

Meanwhile, the "groundbreaking" paper that the article links to has a sample size of 50 children, and the comprehension test accuracy of the digital vs print groups were 56.25% and 57.75% respectively, both with a standard deviation of around 28%. The researchers found that medium (digital vs print) influenced comprehension scores with a p value of 0.457 (aka, it didn't).

Nonsense article.

Interesting study, but the claims of 'digital' vs 'print' are overly broad. The only digital setup tested was scrolling text on a laptop screen. No attempts were made to isolate factors that could influence the findings such as paging vs scrolling presentation, text clarity (resolution, aliasing) viewport size (fullpage vs small letterbox) , digital technology (ePaper vs (unspecified) typical laptop panel) or ambient dexterity (lightweight handhelp device vs. static deskbound laptop).

Given these gaps with significant impact plausibility, I feel claims extending the findings to the entire 'digital" domain should be toned down explicitly before publication.

Furthermore in should be noted that the results did not find differenc in resulting comprehension, just differences in measured brain activity. Specifically "there were no significant differences between the medium of presentation in comprehension of the texts, reading times, or performance on a measure of information retention. "

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.30.553693v1

We are designed to think (and communicate!) with a feedback loop of generated and perceived body movement, touch, visual exploration and object manipulation.

I suspect that watching how children move their bodies and eyes while learning on paper vs. screen would highlight some significant differences in processing.

Similarly with electronic and physical books.

A physical book and its pages are part fidget spinner.

We all have some degree of physical-intellectual synesthesia.

This is known thing, a fountain pen or even feather pen, making so much hardware feedback, it affect learning.

Even cheap hardware keyboards are much better in this, than cheap touchscreen.

Modern digital pen, like Wacom top series, with appropriate software (Krita), could return these important feelings, but fortunately, already exist cheaper alternatives, so for me question, is just when education will see elephant at the room and use all these tech for good.

I suppose that when writing first arrived, kids learned better from spoken word. We’re still at the dawn of passing information by screen. It’ll take time before we adjust, the questions are how much time? and what comes next?

To answer the question posed by the title: Nothing. Because pushing screens to school was never for the purpose of kids learning better. Kids should be given the option to use paper instead of being forced to use screens.

1. No one has to have made that specific claim to warrant something be done.

2. Pushing screens to schools may have been accepted under the impression they weren’t worse than learning on paper.

This is probably survivorship bias. We've known how to teach well on paper for a while, we're just learning what screens can do.

I once experimented with doing math homework in Xournal++ using a [drawing display](https://www.xp-pen.com/product/artist-pro-16.html).

It was heaven. I could write at my normal speed. If I made a mistake, one tap of a button erased it, faster than if I were using a pencil. Then I could select symbols by just drawing through them, then copypaste them a line below without worrying about copying errors like dropping a sign. If my writing started to get too messy or cramped, I could just drag things around. And I could change colors of things anytime I needed, which helped me reason through a lot of things.

At least when it comes to math and manipulating symbols (e.g. proofreading marks), it's not the screen that's the problem, it's just the keyboard and mouse.

Jeez, theguardian.com is just crap journalism. This should be blacklisted from HN for wasting my time.