I like to read.

 

We may be moving in a few months and while my wife looks around our cluttered tiny house and worries about how to get rid of useless stuff, I have a singular worry of having to go through and pare down my books.

 

For my wedding somebody gave me a first edition Kobo e-reader to take on my honeymoon. I can still remember laying on the beach and reading Open, the biography of Andre Agassi, one of the best sports books ever written in my opinion.

 

Sadly I did not read any more books on that Kobo. It currently likely resides somewhere in the clutter my wife is worried about.

 

After reverting back to books for a decade, I took another run at an e-reader with a Kindle about 4 or 5 years ago.

 

This time I had moderate success, but certain books I actually mark up and underline and make notes in as I read. I felt that the ‘highlighting’ feature on the kindle just wasn’t the same.

 

Quickly I devolved to telling myself that I will read on the kindle EXCEPT when I buy a book that I really feel I will want to take notes on or keep for the long term.

 

As you may guess soon EVERY book I purchased fit my made up criteria for buying in physical form.

 

Now the Kindle is somewhere with the Kobo in my personal graveyard of e-readers.

 

Watching my kids go through school I see how reading is changing. It is moving digital to devices like computers, tablets, and even phones.

 

Maybe I’m old (check that…..BECAUSE I am old) I don’t like it.

 

I often have an internal dialogue asking if people retain the same amount when reading via digital means. Or if comprehension is the same.

 

Over the holiday break I saw Adam Grant, a professor and organizational psychologist, pointed out a high-level study on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension.

 

In my never-ending search for confirmation bias I clicked on the link to give me fodder in my upcoming argument with my wife about downsizing my book collection.

 

This study was a meta-analysis which you can think of as a summary of previous studies, pooling the data in order to come up with high-level conclusions.

 

This was a large meta-analysis. After the pooled the data, there were 171,055 participants, making their conclusions more robust.

 

In general, there’s been a continual and gradual shift to increasing dominance of digital reading. We see this across books but also other forms of media (when was the last time you picked up a physical newspaper?) The purported advantages include reduced costs and increased individualization.

 

Comparing these two types of reading media is inherently difficult. With digital reading, you can have hyperlinks, animations, and for school they can include adaptive tests. Additionally, figures do not appear the same between digital and physical mediums. This confounds any assessment of the learning process.

 

On top of this there are ‘moderating effects’ like your past experience with technology. Simply put, the more ‘used to’ reading on digital technologies, potential differences may become greater or lesser.

 

This was a loooooooong paper, so I will just break down and summarize the pertinent points:

1. For READING COMPREHENSION: digital based devices were lower than paper based. The effects were large for some populations, and moderated in others meaning more studies are needed.
2. For TYPE OF CONTENT: When it was information texts, or a combination of informational and narrative texts, paper based reading beat digital based. If it was narrative (think fiction books) only, then there was no effect between digital and paper based.
3. For TYPE OF MEDIA: The advantage of paper based reading was significant when compared with computer based reading, but not when compared to hand-held devices.
4. The main issue for the above seems to be scrolling. When scrolling was necessary, like a computer but not an e-reader, there was a significant advantage for paper based, but only marginal advantage when no scrolling was necessary.
5. For TIME FRAME: the advantage for paper based reading was increased when there was a time constraint (ie a test situation) compared to leisurely self-paced reading.
6. A completely counterintuitive finding from the study is that you would expect as kids grow and get exposed to more and more digital reading that the screen inferiority effect would decrease, but it didn’t. It actually INCREASED after 18 years of age. This suggests that the inferiority of screen use versus paper reading becomes MORE severe as the presence of technology increases! One theory with this is that as kids become more immersed in digital technology, there is a decrease in attention span when using screens which makes sense to me. Kids find it difficult to stay engaged in tasks on screens needing comprehension when they are conditioned to use social media and the like with quick feedback and dopamine bursts.

So what does this all mean?

 

Well the findings have potentially great importance to both education and work.

 

Overall despite the strong appear of digital assessments and digital reading for learning (my grade 6 son gets his own laptop provided by his public school now), the findings from this study show digital may not always be best for fostering deep comprehension and learning.

 

The effects also seem to be most pronounced in younger years of learning. Specifically, when they break down the numbers, the effects of media represent about 2/3rds of the yearly growth in reading comprehension in elementary school. That’s massive. The effects diminish as kids get older, but you also do the majority of your improvement in reading comprehension in your early years of elementary school.

 

If you ask my kids, they will complain that my wife and I are militant in what we call ‘device time’. We limit their time in front of the TV. We also only have ‘device time’ meaning video games or computer games, for one hour on weekend days only. On the Friday it has to be split into ‘creative’ device time, ‘learning’ device time, and then the remainder to do whatever they want (within reason of course).

 

We have ZERO restriction however on books. We probably borrow 10-20 books weekly from the library for the kids. This presents it’s own challenges as we try and pry books from them at the dinner table for example.

 

BUT as they grow up their use of digital technology sure isn’t going to decrease. We want them to learn skills to read critically and emphasize attention on a singular text. This can get hijacked in digital reading.

 

From this study we know that overall people adopt a shallower processing style when using digital environments so why rush to use them?

 

It is evident that digital reading and screen use is here to stay, but I’m not giving up on my paper books just yet.

 

Confirmation bias success!