The Learning Ramifications of Going Paperless

Teaching in a blended setting requires rethinking reading instruction to close gaps in comprehension between digital and print texts

Consider your personal reading habits. Are there particular publications you prefer to read in print versus digital? Would you rather hold a book in your hands when browsing than skim it on your computer or cell phone screen? If so, there probably is a good reason for it.

The fact is you likely do not read as deeply and thoroughly online as you do in print. Research published by the Nielsen Norman Group from as early as 1997 tells us that we are predisposed to merely scan information online, while we are more likely to read text thoroughly if it appears in print.

This makes sense when we think about it. We use the internet to quickly access facts and missing information, scanning to find what we are looking for. When I sit down with a book, I often am mentally committing to read that text word for word and work toward finishing the work.

The nature of digital text is different, too. Print reading is highly linear. You start at the beginning of a printed text and you work your way to the end. However, when we read digital text, we can chase thoughts and ideas by clicking on hyperlinks or opening a new tab and doing a quick Google search. While there are benefits to the ease of accessing this additional information, reading in this way makes it harder to focus and often has a negative impact on our ability to comprehend a text at a deep level, according to work reported in KQED’s Mindshift. (See resource list, “Additional Resources” below).

Specifically, when we read digital text, we are likely to do a better job at focusing on concrete details. However, our ability to synthesize, make inferences and analyze often will be lower than if we were reading the same text in print, according to “Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.”

This is a big problem for teachers to address. As more and more digital text is introduced in classrooms, we must use different reading strategies to close that gap between comprehension of digital and print text.