Digital vs. Print: Reading Comprehension and the Future of the Book
scholarworks.sjsu.edu
scholarworks.sjsu.edu
As this article demonstrates, print books are still the best suited to the optical, cognitive, and metacognitive requirements of the reading brain. While e-paper technology has been shown to be the optical equivalent of print on paper, e-readers still are lacking in the physicality that has been shown to be so important for comprehension. E-readers also lack the haptic qualities that readers enjoy about books, and seem only willing to give up only when convenience and portability are at a premium. In terms of metacognition, ereaders provide limited opportunities for text interaction, while virtual page turning has been demonstrated to discourage review of previously read material. Computer-read texts have all the limitations of e-readers without the superior optics of e-paper, and the added cognitive disadvantage of distractions from multitasking. Hyperlinks, once thought to streamline the learning process, have instead proven to interrupt the seamlessness of the reading process from perception to thought processing, and this is when they are passed over. If links are actually followed, the lack of textual linearity is sure to lead to confusion. When learning from a text is the objective of reading, printed books will remain the preferred format.
"To provide experimental support for the idea that the physicality of a text is important for comprehension, psychologist Anne Mangen (2013) [required] half of the subjects [to] read from an unpaginated pdf file…"
Which is to say that the test was about pagination, not about the difference between a PDF on a computer and the same document on paper.
In a test to determine if the back-lighting of LCD based readers would disrupt sleep habits, subjects using the electronic reader have been forced to read for an hour in a fixed position with the brightness turned all the way up. The subjects reading from paper books were free to adjust their position however they wished.
In other tests, the paper version of a document was properly typeset while the electronic version was rendered in the ugliest font available, with hyphenation turned off.
I have yet to see a paper vs electronic study without odds stacked against the electronic reader.
"Noyes and Garland’s experiment (2005) might account for the experience of long- time astronomy professor David Bruning, who believes that today’s digital native students no longer have the patience necessary to truly engage with and understand difficult reading material…"
I wonder if the perceived shift in generational attention spans is due to over-abundance of entertainment material, a surplus of information, and perhaps our favourite medium of TV essentially training us to have thirty second attention spans?
But no, the report pins the blame on computers because they present information on an electronic screen.
"As this article demonstrates, print books are still the best suited to the optical, cognitive, and metacognitive requirements of the reading brain. While e-paper technology has been shown to be the optical equivalent of print on paper, e-readers still are lacking in the physicality that has been shown to be so important for comprehension."
No, the article demonstrates nothing of the sort. The "lack of physicality" was based on a study which endeavoured to remove all traces of physicality from the electronic document: there was no pagination in the electronic document.
The article already addressed the issue that there are no components of the brain uniquely involved in reading, so the "requirements of the reading brain" is a furphy too!
The article can't even agree with its own sources about the difference between written notes and typed notes:
"Given the demonstrated physicality of reading, it seems likely that typing on a keyboard is, to the writing brain, the cognitive equivalent of reading virtual text, and therefore a more indirect and inferior way of achieving understanding."
versus
"Recent experiments by psychologists Pam A. Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer (2014) confirm that taking notes in cursive facilitates comprehension better than typing notes on a keyboard, possibly because the greater speed of typing leads to verbatim notes, while note taking in cursive tends to be a synthesis of content in a reader’s own words."
Noting that in the experiment where paper and electronic readers were required to study the texts for the same period of time, they got the same results, while in the experiment where both groups of readers were given as much time as they felt they needed, the electronic readers who were reading on computer screens finished sooner and as a consequence got worse results. Somehow this is a reflection on electronic books, rather than the difference in experience between reading a book that you hold in your hands versus a computer screen that remains in a fixed position, forcing the reader to sit at attention.
The issue of reader reluctance to flip backwards through pages on an electronic reader speaks more to the design of the electronic reader's user experience than some innate value of electronic books. More research needs to be done there.
At best, this paper is a nice bibliography for further study by people interested in correcting some of the poor experimental design.
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As far as anecdotes go: I am no longer comfortable reading from paper books. They are bulky, ungainly, and require me to orient myself in relation to an available light source. With a paper book, I can't simply turn the ambient lighting up or down to a comfortable level and read where I want. Even worse, with a paper book, regardless of what markings and annotations I use, I am forced to remember where in the book the information is that I want. In an electronic book, I only need to remember which book contains the information I want. The electronic book reader will help me with the fine navigation.
I agree with the suggestion that handwritten notes encourage better learning outcomes, for exactly the reason suggested in this article (the quote earlier in my reply about hand written notes encouraging the student to rephrase the concept in their own words). Again, I don't have any experimental evidence to support my supposition, so I'll just cherry pick the study that supports my opinion :)
Similarly, a good deal of reader software and formats are designed for the sake of printing out paper hard copies, so you'll still have some degree of pagination displayed on-screen even when there is no intention of printing to paper.
Another part of the pagination problem is simply skeuomorphism in the design of reader software and related file formats. The "page" and "book" metaphor was just too useful to ignore when creating electronic documents for the general public which (originally) had no idea how computers really worked.
BTW, you might also enjoy this study:
I agree that Anne Mangen’s 2012 experiment was about pagination, one aspect of the physicality of a book. She had one group of 10th-graders read continuous digital text that had to be scrolled, while another group of 10th-graders read the same text from four printed pages. The readers of the paper condition performed better on the comprehension test. Mangen interpreted this result to mean that the lack of physicality of continuous screen text inhibits comprehension. Your comments, and those of jcr, lead me to believe that digital text pagination is already common practice and acknowledged as important for comprehension, so it may not have been necessary for me to include this study in my article.
Of course, the readers of digital text in Mangen’s experiment might have performed better with the page-at-a-time text presentation of an e-reader, something I acknowledged in the article. However, an experiment in metacognitive reading strategies conducted in 2013 by Sara J. Margolin found that students who read from current-technology e-readers were less likely to page back to review previously read material. The perceived unwieldiness of paging back on an e-reader might account for the e-reader test group’s slightly lower scores on the comprehension test, by 4 points on a 100-point scale.
As for your contention that “requirements of the reading brain” is a furphy, given that no components of the brain exist uniquely for reading, I would disagree. As explained in my article, according to cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, the reading brain adapts neural structures originally developed for vision, object recognition, and spoken language to reading. Working in concert, these structures—originally evolved for real-world navigation and communication—do seem to have spatial requirements that are not completely satisfied by digital text. To the reading brain, meaning conveyed by words occupies a specific, physical location in the text—the top or bottom of a page, verso or recto on a two-page spread, and at a certain level in the page stack. Anyone who has ever searched through a book with visual memory of the location of a previously read fact can attest to the spatial requirements of the reading brain.
Finally, you question the opinions of long-time astronomy professor David Bruning, who attributes his students’ inability to truly engage with and learn from digital texts to the medium itself. I think Bruning would agree with you that the “over-abundance of entertainment material, a surplus of information, and perhaps our favourite medium of TV” are all contributing to his students’ lack of focus. But he further contends that, since these distractions are just a few clicks away during screen reading, one’s concentration—especially when it comes to studying new, more challenging material—is inevitably compromised. Bruning himself finds it difficult to learn from digital texts, so he would disagree that the problem is confined to millennials; in his view the problem lies with the computer platform, not with the person reading digital text. Although Bruning’s opinions are primarily based on his subjective observations of students through the years, he also cites the work of cognitive researchers in support of his opinions. The short quote form Bruning’s article that I included in my paper does not do justice to his argument; anyone looking for a complete explanation of his preference for print over digital should read his original article: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.libaccess.sjlibrary.org/ehost/pdf...
Thank you again for taking the time to read and comment on my paper, which was really only intended as a summary of current research for librarians in collection development. If it could also serve, even by negative example, as a guide for further research in digital vs print comprehension studies, I would only be pleased!