'A Groundbreaking Study Shows Kids Learn Better On Paper, Not Screens. Now What?' (theguardian.com) 130
In an opinion piece for the Guardian, American journalist and author John R. MacArthur discusses the alarming decline in reading skills among American youth, highlighted by a Department of Education survey showing significant drops in text comprehension since 2019-2020, with the situation worsening since 2012. While remote learning during the pandemic and other factors like screen-based reading are blamed, a new study by Columbia University suggests that reading on paper is more effective for comprehension than reading on screens, a finding not yet widely adopted in digital-focused educational approaches. From the report: What if the principal culprit behind the fall of middle-school literacy is neither a virus, nor a union leader, nor "remote learning"? Until recently there has been no scientific answer to this urgent question, but a soon-to-be published, groundbreaking study from neuroscientists at Columbia University's Teachers College has come down decisively on the matter: for "deeper reading" there is a clear advantage to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen, where "shallow reading was observed." [...] [Dr Karen Froud] and her team are cautious in their conclusions and reluctant to make hard recommendations for classroom protocol and curriculum. Nevertheless, the researchers state: "We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices ... in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print."
I would go even further than Froud in delineating what's at stake. For more than a decade, social scientists, including the Norwegian scholar Anne Mangen, have been reporting on the superiority of reading comprehension and retention on paper. As Froud's team says in its article: "Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning" across the full range of social scientific literature. But the work of Mangen and others hasn't influenced local school boards, such as Houston's, which keep throwing out printed books and closing libraries in favor of digital teaching programs and Google Chromebooks. Drunk on the magical realism and exaggerated promises of the "digital revolution," school districts around the country are eagerly converting to computerized test-taking and screen-reading programs at the precise moment when rigorous scientific research is showing that the old-fashioned paper method is better for teaching children how to read.
Indeed, for the tech boosters, Covid really wasn't all bad for public-school education: "As much as the pandemic was an awful time period," says Todd Winch, the Levittown, Long Island, school superintendent, "one silver lining was it pushed us forward to quickly add tech supports." Newsday enthusiastically reports: "Island schools are going all-in on high tech, with teachers saying they are using computer programs such as Google Classroom, I-Ready, and Canvas to deliver tests and assignments and to grade papers." Terrific, especially for Google, which was slated to sell 600 Chromebooks to the Jericho school district, and which since 2020 has sold nearly $14bn worth of the cheap laptops to K-12 schools and universities.
If only Winch and his colleagues had attended the Teachers College symposium that presented the Froud study last September. The star panelist was the nation's leading expert on reading and the brain, John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist who is skeptical about the promises of big tech and its salesmen: "I am impressed how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues," he told the New York audience. "How is it that none of it has lifted, on any scale, reading? ... It's like people just say, "Here is a product. If you can get it into a thousand classrooms, we'll make a bunch of money.' And that's OK; that's our system. We just have to evaluate which technology is helping people, and then promote that technology over the marketing of technology that has made no difference on behalf of students ... It's all been product and not purpose." I'll only take issue with the notion that it's "OK" to rob kids of their full intellectual potential in the service of sales -- before they even get started understanding what it means to think, let alone read.
I would go even further than Froud in delineating what's at stake. For more than a decade, social scientists, including the Norwegian scholar Anne Mangen, have been reporting on the superiority of reading comprehension and retention on paper. As Froud's team says in its article: "Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning" across the full range of social scientific literature. But the work of Mangen and others hasn't influenced local school boards, such as Houston's, which keep throwing out printed books and closing libraries in favor of digital teaching programs and Google Chromebooks. Drunk on the magical realism and exaggerated promises of the "digital revolution," school districts around the country are eagerly converting to computerized test-taking and screen-reading programs at the precise moment when rigorous scientific research is showing that the old-fashioned paper method is better for teaching children how to read.
Indeed, for the tech boosters, Covid really wasn't all bad for public-school education: "As much as the pandemic was an awful time period," says Todd Winch, the Levittown, Long Island, school superintendent, "one silver lining was it pushed us forward to quickly add tech supports." Newsday enthusiastically reports: "Island schools are going all-in on high tech, with teachers saying they are using computer programs such as Google Classroom, I-Ready, and Canvas to deliver tests and assignments and to grade papers." Terrific, especially for Google, which was slated to sell 600 Chromebooks to the Jericho school district, and which since 2020 has sold nearly $14bn worth of the cheap laptops to K-12 schools and universities.
If only Winch and his colleagues had attended the Teachers College symposium that presented the Froud study last September. The star panelist was the nation's leading expert on reading and the brain, John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist who is skeptical about the promises of big tech and its salesmen: "I am impressed how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues," he told the New York audience. "How is it that none of it has lifted, on any scale, reading? ... It's like people just say, "Here is a product. If you can get it into a thousand classrooms, we'll make a bunch of money.' And that's OK; that's our system. We just have to evaluate which technology is helping people, and then promote that technology over the marketing of technology that has made no difference on behalf of students ... It's all been product and not purpose." I'll only take issue with the notion that it's "OK" to rob kids of their full intellectual potential in the service of sales -- before they even get started understanding what it means to think, let alone read.
Screens associated with other distractions? (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed - correlation v causation (Score:3)
The data seems to point to worse outcomes using screens. However the assumption that it is the screen usage causing the problem seems less well established as no mechanism has been offered. Until something is clearly shown, it's right to be sceptical.
Tactile feedback may be the key. (Score:5, Insightful)
People could have (and in fact did) tell the industry this for years. The object-permanence of the content in a book, as well the diversity of its physical characteristics, has a real effect on immersion, attention, and retention in reading vs. electronic content. Human senses are not extraneous bells and wheels on hearing and vision; all of them feed into our brains on a deep level.
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This is one thing I have serious issues with myself. If I have read something in a book I have a rough idea about how deep in the book it was, and a general 'shape' of the text on that page; was it very densely written, or lots of small paragraphs like quick dialogue in a novel?
I can't use that when scrolling through eg. a large PDF. There's something about the way the next page of text appears in exactly the same spot as the previous page that messes with my mental image of what I am looking for. In a book
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There's also jumping between multiple places in a book. I can read page 200, while keeping one of my fingers in the book on page 150 and quickly flip between them as needed. I have never found a convenient way of doing that with a pdf, other than copying the file, opening it again in another tab and then switching between the tabs.
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A tablet gives no tactile feedback when typing or drawing on it. Paper and writing implements not only give tacticle feedback, but the feedback changes because the writing surface is somewhat random on a small level. You also end up changing your own physical disposition to the paper as you use it, instead of just using thumbs to scroll on a screen.
Unless this study was done with a very unique group of individuals, I think this problem could be a bit more ingrained than the superficial differences.
Consider the 21st Century modern pavlonian subconscious response from a well-addicted eye by the time the child reaches the age of 10 when exposed to a "screen" vs. a piece of paper.
The mainstream welcomes rather horrific amounts of addiction via "screens" these days, with lengths that define attention spans now. The last time paper elicited that kind of re
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Don't forget the LATENCY. Even with an active stylus and 60fps framerate, most people can "outrun" the screen update by an entire letter when writing via stylus.
To eliminate perceptible lag under a stylus in a system where you're updating the screen within 1 frame of detecting stylus motion, you need a framerate approaching 1000fps. At the present time, there isn't even a display cabling standard that can support something like 3840x2160 with 24 (let alone 30 or 36) bit color at a thousand frames per secon
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I still take handwritten notes when it's something important I need to remember. It's been known for a long time that the tactile interaction means better recall and anecdotally I find this accurate.
I greatly prefer paper books to ebooks too, notes or not, but I can't say the same thing for that - just reading something doesn't seem to put it in long term, sometimes even after serious repetition. Use or it or lose it comes to mind.
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It's been shown that handwriting notes involves a lot more of your brain which embeds the notes into your memory much better than simple typing. Both involve reading and understanding the information, but typing you will often just copy it verbatim because it's often easier and requires less processing.
Handwriti
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A tablet gives no tactile feedback when typing or drawing on it.
That's not true. Tactile feedback for drawing is a concept on many tablets both when drawing or typing. It sounds like you may have simply turned this feature off since it is actually incredibly common.
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Learning is multi-sensory. The more senses you can engage while learning, the better the recall. This is not new.
Tablets have both advantages and disadvantages in this. Less tactile/smell more color/motion/sound potential. We need to combine methods to engage students on as many levels as possible.
Also, nothing adequately substitutes for direct human to human interaction. It provides stimulation that cannot be matched by other methods (although other methods can be complimentary) -we are social animals
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What does this even mean? (Score:2)
Are they saying that reading the same thing on digital vs print makes a difference, or is it the quality/style of the text presented on digital vs traditional books? It sounds like the latter, but that is quite different from saying dead trees have a magical quality.
As for the education system, I just find all these arguments tiresome. Public education systems in most western countries suck for one very simple reason - nobody wants to pay for more teachers with higher qualifications. We know this works beca
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The US already has some of the highest per-pupil spending in the developed world. What private schools did differently was they spent less time burying kids in busywork, treated them more like human beings, fed them better, and let them actually spend more time being kids.
Re:What does this even mean? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure but most other comparable western countries have similar public education outcomes as the US. The outlier is Finland which spends about 50% more per pupil. Here in the UK, the govt pays about £6k per student but private school fees are about 3x that.
There is an exactly parallel here with all the endless 'innovations' around agile/new software languages/frameworks etc. The basic idea is that you can take a bunch of cheap crappy developers, and end up with the same outcome as a bunch of top tier developers. This has never worked, and intuition would suggest it will never work, but you can understand the incentive for pointy heads to keep trying. I just feel the same thing has been happening in education - you just need very good teachers and more of them if you want top outcomes, but nobody wants to spend money on this so we will forever hear about new innovations in teaching.
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The outlier is Finland which spends about 50% more per pupil.
Finland spends less per student than either America or the UK.
Education expenditure per country [ed.gov]
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The US already has some of the highest per-pupil spending in the developed world.
I think part of the problem is about 50% of the politicians brag loudly about how incompetent[*] they are, then half of the population votes for them because of not despite that brag. The politicians then, somewhat unusually for politicians actually deliver on their promises and do a bad job of running things.
[*]if a politician is telling you that the government is necessarily bad, then they are telling you they are bad at thei
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Books only know one dimension and one direction. (Score:2)
That may be the reason they train a certain skill better. And that _may_ be the skill that opinion leaders _think_ makes them better humans.
Given, I still like dead tree books. They do force me to stay on topic, have no distraction built in and they don't need electricity and electronics to function. The latter being a very distinct advantage. I still spend money on dead tree copies of writings I consider to be of potential long-term value. All nice, fine and dandy.
But I also have roughly 500 books as free
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I'm pretty sure that books have three dimensions and at least two directions, since you can turn the page BACK to check on something you read earlier.
Sounds like your smartphone is smarter than you, at least.
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It takes extra effort (Score:5, Interesting)
to write things by hand.
Essentially you're making little drawings (letters are drawings, technically).
This may have a profound effect on the way you memorize things.
1) If you're told, chances are you'll forget it fast.
2) If you type it, you stand a bigger chance of remembering it.
3) If you write it by hand, you most likely will remember it.
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I only bring it up because I've had teachers who didn't understand this and sentenced their classes to extended periods of copying.
This, so much this.
I have a hard time with math, which sucks because it shot a giant hole through my childhood dream of being an astronaut, I just don't "get" the numbers. I understand the concepts and know how to do the calculations, I just can't do them mentally, which is why I got into computers and now work as a Systems Analyst - I tell the computer to the math for me. ;-)
No amount of copying times tables ever had me memorizing that 8 x 7 = 56, and yes I had to use the calculator to do that, because my
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What about e-paper? (Score:2)
IMHO it is best of both worlds, but I'm biased. I like it a lot since quite a while ago.
Less stress, less distraction, and with recent e-book readers, quite an improvement on the note-taking part, responsiveness and even color.
How is this groundbreaking? (Score:2)
Three years ago a study showed writing things down [sciencedaily.com] helps you better remember.
"Actually, paper is more advanced and useful compared to electronic documents because paper contains more one-of-a-kind information for stronger memory recall," said Professor Kuniyoshi L. Sakai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tokyo and corresponding author of the research recently published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. The research was completed with collaborators from the NTT Data Institute of Management Consulting.
Contrary to the popular belief that digital tools increase efficiency, volunteers who used paper completed the note-taking task about 25% faster than those who used digital tablets or smartphones.
Although volunteers wrote by hand both with pen and paper or stylus and digital tablet, researchers say paper notebooks contain more complex spatial information than digital paper. Physical paper allows for tangible permanence, irregular strokes, and uneven shape, like folded corners. In contrast, digital paper is uniform, has no fixed position when scrolling, and disappears when you close the app.
Studies from over a decade ago showed the same thing [ascd.org].
What's old is what's new again.
I don't blame the tech (Score:2)
Tech is, after all, only a tool.
I don't blame the salespeople, nor the firms pushing this. Their goal is to sell shit.
I fully, completely, and unreservedly blame school boards and administrators for wasting precious school resources and worse - critical years for a generation of young people with whose educational care they were entrusted. In the most charitable formulation, they fell for the snake oil bullshit WE ALL KNEW WAS BULLSHIT (and some of us may have told them so, repeatedly in school board meet
Ever been on Stackoverflow, lately? (Score:2)
It's not paper vs. screen, per se.
It's just that the screen also gives access to a wealth of information on the Intertubes.
Including many flashy web sites that will assure you that you do not need to waste years of your life studying a particular subject using a traditional textbook, with an organized, well-developed, logical curriculum that introduces and explains each progressively complicated topic, one chapter at a time, in a disciplined manner.
No, all you have to do is take a few quizzes, or solve a bu
One of many factors (Score:2)
Complete And Utter Garbage (Score:2)
The whole notion is complete and utter bullshit. The medium through which words are conveyed has exactly zero effect on reading comprehension. Be it paper, computer, projector, etc., a clear conveyance of words is equally effective as any other.
The biggest effector (assuming no brain damage that prevents comprehension) is motivation. People who are motivated to read will learn to read.
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OK, easy... (Score:2)
back to teleprinters then
Not really surprising (Score:2)
When our son's school switched to tablet based learning 10 years ago we immediately moved him to another school.
Other parents thought we were crazy. I figured it was an insane experiment with an unknown outcome that would affect my children (I also had a pre-schooler) during a critical phase of their education.
Safe to say, I'm glad we decided to switch back to a more conservative school.
If paper is better (Score:2)
This leads to the question: What is 'best'?
Read the paper (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/conten... [biorxiv.org]
They showed children text passages on "digitally" and on paper. There is extensive description of the text but no description of how it was actually presented beyond that. Later they measured EEG responses to probe words that were related, not related or in between, to the text. They also measured how well the probe words were rated, reaction time, and a bunch of other text comprehension performance measures.
There were no significant differences between print and digital on any of the measures. Their conclusions are based on visual inspection of the EEG, which itself seems a bit of a speculative measure regarding reading comprehension, and possibly a differences of differences error where they measured a significant difference between related and unrelated probe words on printed text but not on "digital" text. The actual performance is very close between media in absolute terms as well.
So, no significant differences, which also agrees with a previous study that found no significant differences in children, although it did find differences in older adults.
This is due to our inner feedback-translate-loop (Score:2)
When we ingest materials / ideas / concepts, written in someone else's style, those concepts get translated by our brains to our inner perception of the world and of the concepts presented. When we write them back down on paper, we're often going to use a different writing style than the author's. In the process, we also pass the materials through our short term memory, and the translated output (which we would write down, if we needed to), is easier for our brains to associate and remember long term.
In con
cui bono (Score:2)
If any of the possible improvements that tech can bring to schools had been focused on improving the lot of the students the results may have been different.
instead the focus was solely on making lives easier for the teachers to grade, for the administrators to generate metrics to "prove" their efficacy, for the politicians to enforce their uneducated biases about curriculum content and to reduce costs so far as I can tell
More about implementation than the tech itself.... (Score:2)
I'm convinced the biggest problem we've had with education is the adoption of costly technology for the sake of "bragging rights". It just sounds like a school is providing a "better" quality education when it can point out all the digital white-boards, laptops for every child and anything else "high tech" that's in use.
Do kids absorb content better reading a book on paper vs on a screen? I'd say it's probably a toss-up, IF you gave them the right digital alternative to the paper book. By that, I mean first
it's annoying (Score:2)
Reading on screens is annoying. There are a number of reasons, but the primary one imo is that the user interface is very artificial. You don't do stuff in the world, like flipping pages. Marking things is a pain, you can't thumb through a book; everything on a screen is a nuisance... except making comments!
Who wrote the lead-in paragraph? (Score:2)
Who wrote this in the lead-in paragraph? The study isn't even published yet. Of course its findings are "not yet widely adopted". Why would they be?
Sheesh. Clearly, whoever wrote this read the article itself on a screen.
A single study with a sample size of 59 is not decisive, no matter how well don
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How much of the issue is content? (Score:3)
My younger daughter use to have an electronic Maths textbook, and it was nonsense. It would use abstract ideas to describe simple concepts, then use the most ridiculous examples to try and teach every possible area of mathematics. I can remember one example that was trying to explain fractions and ratios, using boxes, groups, square and bananas. The example was trying to get kids to understand 30% or 1/3, except it made absolutely no sense. I'm an engineer, with two engineering designations, and I couldn't understand the example. I used Octave to model the example, and proved it couldn't work. Furthermore, I ended up modelling a handful of example from that book, none of them, 0% of the examples made sense or could be replicated with a model. I showed her teachers who scuffed, and tried to educate me, without ever being able to explain the examples.
It could be maths, history, science, geography (oh boy, the geography book, I still shutter to think of that POS), nothing made sense at all. One of the books this year tried to explain racism, got it entirely wrong, like comically Trump speech level wrong, and ended up with a statement to paraphrase: "White people are garbage, disgraceful, bigoted racists, because Native Americans exist." I asked a number of the parents, and only the most left wing nut jobs thought it made sense. Neither kid could explain what racism was, and to this day they still think that racism is being Caucasian.
It's gotten to the point that Teachers (the ones I've dealt with), can't explain anything. My younger daughter's teach just goes on daily rants about how white people are terrible piles of shit, and has resulted to blaming the students for injustice against "her people". When my daughter asked her to provide an example, the teacher got mad, and said, to paraphrase: "That question offends me, so we won't discuss it.", then made the white kids apologize to her, and when my daughter refused, she got in trouble.
When I complained to the teacher, principal, and superintended, I got a paraphrased response about minorities and the need for understanding. Education is essentially a guilt trip for people with white skin, and an apology contest.
I read almost everything they bring home, because I have reteach most of it, and if either kid uses a proper defensible method, that doesn't include feelings, emotions and an apology, even in maths, they get marks deducted (seriously).
So, how much of the problem is content vs the format?
Multiple reasons (Score:2)
1. eBooks take a relative ETERNITY to flip between pages, compared to a book where you can hold one or more pages between your fingers and more or less instantly flip back and forth with no lag or latency.
2. one page vs 2-up view. For literally CENTURIES, the norm for technical books has been, "diagram on one page, text explaining it on the facing page". Most ebooks shoot that paradigm to hell, either by allowing you to see only one page at a time (with non-insignificant delay when flipping back and forth),
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah, the problem is "what" happens on screens that doesn't on paper.
Paper is expensive, so books are often small, fit in your gaze, and require holding your place with your fingers.
Screens are cheap, the content can be changed, how you navigate (with a mouse, or by touch) is distracting, and you can be distracted by illustrations, or advertisements.
You can have any book you want on a screen, so why are you wasting time reading some thing you're not interested in, look shiny colorful fruit merging game yay!
I think really the only objective reason why kids might not learn as well on screens is not that they're on screens, but that they're on something that allows them to get distracted, text messages, twitter, instagram, facebook, are all vying for your attention on the same device.
So the answer is really to start disconnecting devices from the internet if you want kids to learn a specific thing on them. If it's a textbook they should be learning from, load the textbook, and then cut the internet.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
Be careful about giving too much credence to the experiment referenced in TFS.
They gave middle school students a passage to read on both paper and a screen while using an EEG to measure their brainwaves.
The students reading on paper had a brainwave pattern more closely associated with paying attention.
That's it. That was the whole experiment. They didn't actually test for comprehension or retention. They just looked at brainwaves.
It is an interesting experiment, but it is silly to describe it as "decisive" as TFS does.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
Be careful about giving too much credence to the experiment referenced in TFS.
They gave middle school students a passage to read on both paper and a screen while using an EEG to measure their brainwaves.
The students reading on paper had a brainwave pattern more closely associated with paying attention.
That's it. That was the whole experiment. They didn't actually test for comprehension or retention. They just looked at brainwaves.
It is an interesting experiment, but it is silly to describe it as "decisive" as TFS does.
I think that is the issue, it's much easier to be distracted by a screen.
Also highlights the shit state of science reporting (pretty much world wide) that even on a site like Slashdot where the majority are scientifically minded an experiment that shows children are less distracted reading from a book than from a screen ends with the headline "kids learn better on paper"... It's the kind of Boomer baiting headline I expect from the Daily Mail as "study shows some children may pay more attention to a book than a screen" wouldn't be clickbaity enough.
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I don't know that the majority here are scientifically minded. I think that might need to be studied :)
I think most people here are here not because of science, but because ooh tech is neato! This explains how there can be so many Macintosh users here now who insist that Apple taking away options makes their lives better. They don't care about what's best, or what makes the most sense, they just want validation for their choice of what's superficially easy and shiny. Or how so many people can insist that we
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After listening to Decoding the Gurus and Very Bad Wizards review various breathtaking studies "that should change the world" - I was basically assuming the study didn't show anything of the sort that was reported. As the GPP said - a brainwave pattern we think means paying attention. Whoopde fucking do. And what's worse IMHO is this is because it's cheaper or cooler to use "sciencey EEGs", but it seems like we could at least have used widely available reading comprehension tests to get closer to something
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For someone who has not read the papers, your conclusion might make sense. However there is a lot more background, lending credence to their methods.
I recommend this short review at Nature:
https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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What you linked is full of jargon and incomprehensible to most. "The N400 response in ERP components?" [wikipedia.org] (Thank you Google, for getting me to Wikipedia, which is yet another summary, but approaches adequacy).
Yeah. The Guardian is supposed to be Googling the terms in that article, like I just had to. Not the casual reader. It's like reading a foreign language you're vaguely familiar with. You have to look up every other word.
I guess the only lesson here is don't get your science news from The Guardian. Or mayb
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That's a preface to say...I STILL heavily prefer to do my reading on dead tree materials.
When I buy books to read for pleasure...I buy dead tree, real BOOKs.
At work...if I have something I really need to learn and pay attention to and remember, I often will print things out if it's online only....
I find that like in college, I retain much better if on the pages I read, that I make notations or even doodles....
I can then often, close my eyes and "see" the pages in my head, with the doodles a
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Part of it certainly has to be "what you grew up with" I think. I caught ebooks pretty early in 2000 and I was like 18. I've never found an issue with reading digitally, though I generally don't put as much mental effort into memorization at all with easy search.
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TL;DR - If you are reading this TL;DR because you need to, you may be a part of a problem with Internet modernity. You are not "part of the problem," however. I'm going to go on a bit. That's just what it takes folks. Sorry.
You say:
It is an interesting experiment, but it is silly to describe it as "decisive" as TFS does.
You are referring to this:
neuroscientists at Columbia University's Teachers College has come down decisively on the matter
This is a quotation of the Guardian. It is literally TFS within TFS. We somehow needed to summarize twice. Problematic. The paragraph ends with this:
[Dr Karen Froud] and her team are cautious in their conclusions and reluctant to make hard recommendations for classroom protocol and curriculum. Nevertheless, the researchers state: "We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices ... in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print."
It directly contradicts the Guardian's overly firm and, dare I say, hyperbolic statement.
Here's what I th
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Since they didn't test reading retention or comprehension, just EEG "signs of paying attention", was that paying attention to the text or to the less familiar medium they were reading it on? Run the same test on senior citizens and see if the results flip.
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Be careful about giving too much credence to the experiment referenced in TFS.
They gave middle school students a passage to read on both paper and a screen while using an EEG to measure their brainwaves.
The students reading on paper had a brainwave pattern more closely associated with paying attention.
That's it. That was the whole experiment. They didn't actually test for comprehension or retention. They just looked at brainwaves.
It is an interesting experiment, but it is silly to describe it as "decisive" as TFS does.
Actually no, there's a bunch of comprehension tests starting on p22 [biorxiv.org]. I mostly just skimmed but my (bad) summary is the following:
They were interested in whether this N400 neurological measure could see the difference between in engagement between print and digital reading, they seem to have shown that.
They also measured the comprehension of kids afterwards, but there the standard deviation of kid performance was so large that I don't think they were able to show any results.
Anyone with the time and trainin
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I think really the only objective reason why kids might not learn as well on screens is not that they're on screens, but that they're on something that allows them to get distracted, text messages, twitter, instagram, facebook, are all vying for your attention on the same device.
So the answer is really to start disconnecting devices from the internet if you want kids to learn a specific thing on them. If it's a textbook they should be learning from, load the textbook, and then cut the internet.
Teacher here, can confirm! I'm constantly have to compete for attention against all those dopamine-inducing distractions, and it doesn't matter how much you restrict or block access. Even on school issued, locked down Chromebooks the kids spend time finding creative ways around the blocks and are very clever about it. We can use a strict whitelist and block most websites, they'll find a mirror on some cloud service. We tried to block all the chat features, but then Google goes and adds chat into gmail and w
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Parent here. I can confirm the same at home by looking at the history in my router's log files. No matter how well I try to set up filters my teenage boys always find ways to delve into distractions. And frustratingly, I can't totally cut of access because every fricking thing has to be in the cloud. Our schools need to go back to hardcopy text books and hand written assignments in these formative years.
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The thing to check is if reality or expectations for the medium are involved. That is, if you remove the distractions from the screen and just show the text, will that fix it or is the problem that kids expect and even anticipate the distractions on the screen?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, personally, it's because screens remove the possibility of what I'd call " fixed spaciality"* .
Explanation attempt: When I have an english dictionary in my hands, I can guess where the letter "P" should be, and immediately open it more or less there.
This also translates into reverse: often I remember "where" in a book I read something (as in 2/3 in, bottom left) , and by having the context, remember a bit better.
This works even more if it's my own notes. Electronic notes have no fixed place.
On screens, there is nothing resembling this: anything can be anywhere at any time.
That's why I'm unable to use e-books for technical stuff: searching for something that I know was "bottom left, left page, at about 2/3 of the book" is impossible.
Also while writing, physical paper allows for faster changes: think of a better word in the middle of writing a bad one, finish writing bad word (or stop), write better word, cross out bad word. The crossing out takes less than half a second, not interrupting the flow of words. Even ReMarkable takes a bit more time...
* A comment further down names this "object-permanence"
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
+1 for object permanence.
While screens are more flexible in terms of interactivity, they can only be interacted with in the ways which have been coded up by the programmer.
When learning a topic, I often put a bunch of post-its in the book which stick out the side with notes on them, i.e.annotated bookmarks. When I need to cross reference, I stick my finger in the page I'm on, open it at the bookmark, then kind of flip back and forth between the two as I need extra bits of info. The physical location of the bookmarks is a big cue.
Also I can add stickies on the pages with notes (or just write marginal notes).
That kind of thing is basically impossible with electronic sources. If you're well equipped you can kinda do it maybe with two copies up on a big screen, but that works at best for one bookmark. You can get to the initial point faster on a computer usually compared ot flicking through pages, but with a bookmark in place it's slower. Plus somehow the switch from reading to keyboarding is a context switch and distracting from reading.
I think also formatting has something to do with it. Screens vary so the formatting needs to be jack of all trades and master of none, compared ot a good book where it's spot on for precisely the formfactor it's printed in, and just doesn't exist otherwise.
Plus books always feel more information dense? I don't know if it's the contrast, the dynamic range, the difference between reflected versus emitted light or what, but I can't read small fonts as comfortably on a screen (yep even a retina display) compare to a book. This matters more for techincal,i.e. learning stuff.
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> Plus somehow the switch from reading to keyboarding is a context switch and distracting from reading.
I'd characterize it more like when using digital, one part of the brain is occupied by maintaining a state machine representing the current state of the device.
> Screens vary so the formatting needs to be jack of all trades and master of none
I'd argue that's our own damn fault, by not letting the screens format as they wish. EPub format being basically HTML is my favourite, in that the device formats
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I'd argue that's our own damn fault, by not letting the screens format as they wish.
I believe it's a necessity. Unless we mandate all screens are the same size, shape and density then the formatting must by necessity be flexible, which means not optimized for a particular device.
EPub format being basically HTML is my favourite, in that the device formats the book (splitting it into pages etc...) . Reading PDFs (or anything that enforces formatting) on anything is a giant PITA.
I find ebook formatting just f
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Post-it type notes are a standard feature of most decent computer-based readers and they are searchable. Can't do that with a post-it.
Having to search them means they're not really used as I use post-its. They're also a physical tool to access the pages quickly and flip between them. I don't need to type in a search term, parse the list and select the correct one.
Post-its, the real ones, cue into my spatial memory, the computer ones don't.
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I think this is more of a learned preference. I find searching old text manuals with good table of content much slowed than typing ctrl+f in a PDF reader and parsing the results.
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Nowadays if this PDF doesn't do it for me, then I'll not waste time and I'll go find some other source.
Both you, and Luckyo above you, are referring to finding specific bits of mostly-technical information in material with which you're already basically familiar. When reading non-technical material - even material you're already familiar with - searching is more problematic.
I use Ctrl+F all the time when I'm reading tech data or searching a service manual. But when I'm reading fiction as an eBook or a PDF, it doesn't work well. I'm usually looking for a specific passage - something a character said, some eve
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Nowadays if this PDF doesn't do it for me, then I'll not waste time and I'll go find some other source.
Both you, and Luckyo above you, are referring to finding specific bits of mostly-technical information in material with which you're already basically familiar. When reading non-technical material - even material you're already familiar with - searching is more problematic.
I use Ctrl+F all the time when I'm reading tech data or searching a service manual. But when I'm reading fiction as an eBook or a PDF, it doesn't work well. I'm usually looking for a specific passage - something a character said, some event that occurred, etc. Any 'keyword' that I might use will probably occur so many times in the book that using it to find a specific passage is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Yes, if I have to find something quickly, for technical matters Ima searching a pdf. I do believe that reading something on paper is superior to seeing it on a screen, and suspect different sections of the brain come into play. Possibly related is one of my own experiences. I take notes. A lot of notes. But I never reference them. Something in the process of writing down of the notes causes me to remember them well.
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I prefer to search by key phrases because of this when searching in books. For example a part of a specific sentence that was unusual in structure and got stuck in my memory.
But I think this is more about how you memory works. I tend to remember passages pretty easily, to the point where I can go without a bookmark in an ebook. I can jsut remember some random passage from the last chapter I read and seach for that. While words will be often repeated, passages have much less repetiotion.
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When I am reading on a screen, and the author starts to drift off into trivia or irrelevancies, I am much more likely to abandon the article and go read something more interesting.
So, my comprehension of that article will go down, but my overall learning goes up.
The Internet has made me much less tolerant of bad writing.
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Electronic notes have no fixed place.
What? You get a bookmarks pane with all your bookmarks in order, click on them and it jumps to the page. Not to mention you can search the text. As long as you can remember two or three words in order from your reference you can find it again, usually faster than flipping pages even once.
On screens, there is nothing resembling this: anything can be anywhere at any time.
Most e-Book readers feature a page view, where when you flip back and forth words appear in the same places every time.
Also while writing, physical paper allows for faster changes
What? That's nonsense. I hold ctrl+shift and press left arrow once and the word I've written so far is s
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> click on them and it jumps to the page
"jumps": you have no immediate feedback where in the text you actually are. ie the reader has no connection to the place in the text.
It's like when flying: at both ends the airports are pretty much the same, and within the metal tube no landscape changes were perceived.
> As long as you can remember two or three words in order from your reference
I often don't. Some languages don't have fixed word orders (opposite English and its fixed order of adjectives) making
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Congratulations, I guess? You made it work for you, I still haven't managed to not get distracted by the mental lookup of "what procedure to perform for the operation I want"
I see this all the time, people don't know how to perform the most basic functions provided by their OS. Then they complain that it's hard to do things that are trivial. Well, you had to learn how to hold a book, you had to learn how to flip to a page, you actually built structures in your brain for that task. It wasn't automatic. It distracted you until you got better at it, you just don't remember now.
I still haven't managed to not get distracted by the mental lookup of "what procedure to perform for the operation I want" and the state machine of the word processor I'm using.
They "all" (for a pretty reasonable value of "all") work the same way! Name a single platform more than a
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I'm largely aphantasic, so I can't take advantage of that. I can remember smells or sounds, but not shapes or colors. I have to remember the fact of the way something looked and can't remember the way it looks directly (I don't "picture" things in my head)
Has it occurred to you that this is quite unusual, and most people don't work that way?
What? That's nonsense. I hold ctrl+shift and press left arrow once and the word I've written so far is selected, I start typing and the old word is gone and the new word
Re: Why? (Score:2)
"Now consider you're learning something mathematical and want to scrawl a short fragment of an equation. Or fragment of a diagram."
You can do that with even Adobe reader, too. And I can whip out my graphics tablet to do it if I want. Or on a platform with a pen, I can draw annotations on any page. So that's just one more example of something that yes, I can do digitally.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, personally, it's because screens remove the possibility of what I'd call " fixed spaciality"* . Explanation attempt: When I have an english dictionary in my hands, I can guess where the letter "P" should be, and immediately open it more or less there. This also translates into reverse: often I remember "where" in a book I read something (as in 2/3 in, bottom left) , and by having the context, remember a bit better.
^^This, a thousand times. One thing that you hinted at but didn't mention directly is the importance of what I'll call 'random access capability while reading'.
Whether I'm reading fictional, factual, or reference material, I very frequently want to revisit something I already read. It may be because I forgot some detail, or because what I'm currently reading provides context for and insight into something I read a few pages - or a few dozen or a few hundred pages - prior to what I'm reading now.
In a paper book, that's made fairly easy by the fact that I can scan the pages quickly as I'm riffling through them to ascertain if I'm getting close. On a screen, that's just not possible.
When I'm reading a book on a screen, I find I'm more likely to abandon it before finishing. For people whose attention spans seem already shortened compared with those of previous generations, I can imagine that effect might be even stronger.
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Also while writing, physical paper allows for faster changes: think of a better word in the middle of writing a bad one, finish writing bad word (or stop), write better word, cross out bad word. The crossing out takes less than half a second, not interrupting the flow of words.
I give programming lessons. I'm appalled at how people use the keyboard/mouse, even somewhat experienced programmers. They'll mistype a word, like 'mistale' instead of 'mistake', grab the mouse, place it between 'a' and 'l', click and select the 'l', press 'Del', type 'k', grab the mouse again, click after the 'e' and keep on typing. It's infuriating when you see it 3 times per minute. A LOT of people have sub-optimal typing mannerisms like that, I don't
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I'm appalled at how people use the keyboard/mouse, even somewhat experienced programmers. They'll mistype a word, like 'mistale' instead of 'mistake', grab the mouse, place it between 'a' and 'l', click and select the 'l', press 'Del', type 'k', grab the mouse again, click after the 'e' and keep on typing. It's infuriating when you see it 3 times per minute. A LOT of people have sub-optimal typing mannerisms like that, I don't see how they can keep 'in the flow' with such behaviors.
Then you will enjoy this:
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That's why I'm unable to use e-books for technical stuff: searching for something that I know was "bottom left, left page, at about 2/3 of the book" is impossible.
ctrl + f my man, jesus. I thought i was cool owning the C++ reference book but Id rather just use something digital if I actually care to know it, eff owning a bunch of physical books and searching like a peasant
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There's a scene from one of the ST:TNG media -- I think First Contact -- where Picard and Data traveled back in time and are observing a famous historical artefact. Picard touches it and remarks how it seems more real to him than simply reading about it or looking at it. Data touches it and replies that he became aware of some imperfection of construction, but the thing seems no more real to him than just before.
I think it's the same thing for learning from printed paper.
Re: Why? (Score:2)
You realize the author of the article also funded the research. The sample size is ridiculously small at 59 kids. And even the research is reluctant to draw a hard conclusion or make a recommendation to education planners. Maybe this is true but at this point it seems more likely this person just doesnâ(TM)t like reading on screens.
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I'm sure a lot of us are thinking
I wouldn't bet on that.
Why is this the case?
It's not. It's a bad summary of an even worse study.
so far it seems the only answer is that screens are worse than books
"Answer" is a pretty strong word. I'm not sure that you, or anyone other than a brain-damaged science reporter, would feel the same way after reading the abstract.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
hold the horses. the differences of the study aren't significant at all. this is the most "significant" metric they got:
ComprehensionAccuracy
Immediate Recall Comprehension Task
Sentence Verification (digital vs print)
Explicit 64.33% (21.96%) 65.33% (20.16%)
Paraphrase 52.33% (27.56%) 54.00%(22.22%)
Meaning Change 30.00% (14.68%) 27.67%(18.63%)
Unrelated 78.33% (22.14%) 84.00% (19.33%)
TOTAL 56.25%(28.17%) 57.75%(28.59%)
Delayed Retention Comprehension Task
Explicit 63.33% (22.59%) 63.33% (19.22%)
Paraphrase 49.33% (20.75%) 48.67% (23.77%)
Meaning Change 24.67% (15.87%) 25.33% (19.70%)
Unrelated 63.33% (29.16%) 65.67% (28.45%)
TOTAL 50.17%(27.45%) 50.75% (28.12%)
to the editors credit (for a change) the researchers do claim there is a "significant difference". well, i don't see it.
https://www.biorxiv.org/conten... [biorxiv.org]
my intuition is that there is a difference in general over time but that's not the text medium, that just because kids today read less than they did, as much of the information they get is spoken or visual media, plus teaching material tends to be more oriented to quizzs than to plain old prose. then again i have no data and i'm not even sure that's a bad thing or hugely relevant. times change, the world changes, so does our intellectual approach.
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There's a very simple and plausible reason:
Books come with fewer distractions.
That's probably not the only reason, as I've noticed personally that short snippets are easily read from a screen, but for longer works I want a printout. Partially this is clearly because I can read the printout wherever I want, but that doesn't feel like a complete answer.
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I'm sure a lot of us are thinking this. Why is this the case? Are all screens equal? OLED vs LCD. TFT vs IPS? Are e-ink readers like remarkable any better? Lots of questions but so far it seems the only answer is that screens are worse than books without a reason. Hopefully this will lead to improvements in screens such that there will be comparable comprehension to books.
Paper doesn't have alt-tab / click-to-other-window to distract you. That's probably one part of it.
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I'd guess it's because the e-book versions of textbooks, are poorly designed. They're clunky to use, like a lot of government-funded software is clunky to use. These textbooks aren't typically housed in a slick e-reader like Amazon Kindle, but rather, some cheaply-produced custom e-reader that focuses on making sure the textbook company gets paid, more than students getting an education.
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It's not your imagination. Proper books have approximately 1200dpi resolution. The best printing approaches 2400dpi.
Try viewing two pages side-by-side on a 1920x1080 display. Assuming you can even make out the letters, they're REALLY hard to read... even on a 17-inch diagonal display that approaches the physical dimensions of a normal computer book opened to two facing pages.
At 3840 x 2160-2560, the problem isn't quite as bad... but it's STILL kind of like comparing shitty inkjet printing to a professinally
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NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
This is not how science works, and it's not how it should work. There is absolutely nothing wrong with publishing early results which indicate something may be the case. Other people are free to build on that. Anyone who's interested can not write a proposal to get funding for further, larger studies.
If you cannot cope with an article that's not a source of absolute truth, it's a you problem not a science problem.
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Are you complaining about the scientists publishing of the science journalism?
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There were studies done 10-15 years ago proving that knowledge retention was better with a book/paper than a screen. Did the authors really think they "discovered" something new? How can known information be "groundbreaking"?
Even earlier -- when white screens with black text and black screens with white or green text were equally common -- the question was raised: which is best for proof-reading text. A report found that white and black screens were about the same but that printed hardcopy was better. This was reported in an ACM publication, possibly 25 or more years ago.
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