You read digital text faster, but when you have to read a long text, you understand it better when you read it from paper. The question of whether you can read better from paper or better on your screen is similar to our piece about typing versus writing. Because here too, research does not show a clear convincing advantage for one method over the other. students often indicate a preference for a screen over a book, but digital reading does not always yield better results. To begin with, a recent meta-analysis (an analysis over a series of studies) found that the difference in text comprehension between reading digitally or from paper likely depends on the length of the text. For short texts, there is little difference between the two methods. But when it comes to longer texts, it turns out that it is easier to have a mental image of the text. You can clearly see where a piece of text begins and ends, and you often remember, for example, where in a text a certain piece of information was located. This information could help you process the text. An advantage of a digital text is that hypertext can be used: a word that contains a link to a website. This can help students better understand the text. Additionally, a digital text is read faster than a printed text. The danger with a laptop screen remains the digital distraction. Students switch activities every 3 to 10 minutes when working on a laptop. This distraction can cause them to process the text more superficially and therefore understand it less well. It turns out that when reading a text digitally, students remember details better, but they have a better overall understanding of the text when they read a printed text. So, it is not necessarily worse to read information from a screen. But even though students see themselves as experts when it comes to reading online texts, they sometimes do well to pick up their book. Teach students that when they need to understand a text well, they are better off printing it than reading it digitally.
Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., & Salmerón, L. (2018). Don’t throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25, 23-38.
Kaufman, G., & Flanagan, M. (2016, May). High-low split: Divergent cognitive construal levels triggered by digital and non-digital platforms. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2773-2777). ACM.
Kong, Y., Seo, Y. S., & Zhai, L. (2018). Comparison of reading performance on screen and on paper: A meta-analysis. Computers & Education, 123, 138-149.
Mangen, A., Walgermo, B. R., & Brønnick, K. (2013). Reading linear texts on paper versus computer screen: Effects on reading comprehension. International journal of educational research, 58, 61-68.
Margolin, S. J., Driscoll, C., Toland, M. J., & Kegler, J. L. (2013). E‐readers, computer screens, or paper: Does reading comprehension change across media platforms?. Applied cognitive psychology, 27(4), 512-519.