The COVID-19 pandemic has created a tumultuous last few years for teachers, forcing schools into online learning, where few educators had experience. The result was students, teachers, and administrators learning together. Teachers strived to modify education to fit a virtual environment and brought new lesson designs. Instead of passing out articles or texts on paper in an English class, the texts became digital, or in a Science class, labs became virtual. Teachers came up with new ways of giving information such as flipping their classroom or doing online games to help engage students. Navigating back to hybrid and fully in person learning many teachers now face the question what do we do with all these new lessons?
Students engage in different forms of online learning, and that requires reading multimodal texts and using different literacies to read, write, listen, and speak (New London Group, 1996). Transitioning back to face to face learning has shown a drop in academic literacies as measured by standardized tests, making stakeholders concerned about students’ literacy skills. For teachers to maximize the impact of instruction on literacy, when is digital best and when is print best in the classroom? For example, if a teacher is attempting to have students synthesize texts for analysis, should the texts be print or digital? What if a teacher wants students to take notes on a text for use later: should students take notes digitally or on paper?
Writing & Taking Notes
There is no clear answer for any of these questions, but there are conditions that seem to favor one over the other and inform classroom practices. Notetaking and writing has been studied in several conditions. For example, Aragon-Mendisabal and colleagues (2016) gave undergraduate students three tasks: write the ABCs as many times as you can, write as many sentences as you can, and copy 35 words. Students used either paper or their own laptops. The students who took notes on the computer were faster and better at writing sentences, but those who used paper were better at remembering the words. It would seem that if teachers want students to use full sentences, such as composing writing, then digital would be better. However, if memory recall is the goal then paper would be best.
Notetaking isn’t always in a distraction-free environment. Lin & Bigenho (2011) looked at how well undergraduate students would remember words if there were no distractions, auditory distractions (other words playing), or auditory and visual distractions (other words playing and videos playing). If there were no distractions, paper was better than computer notes. However, when there were both auditory and visual distractions, no notes produced the best memory recall, and students reported feeling overwhelmed. The implication is that distractions matter when trying to learn something, and even taking notes can’t overcome any and all distractions. Most recently, Flanagan and colleagues (2022) measured the completeness of taking notes on the computer vs. on paper and found that when undergraduates took notes on paper they had three times more complete ideas compared to taking notes on the computer, and students included more images, indicating that paper notes still have advantages.
Although taking notes on the computer appears to be faster and help write complete sentences, there seem to be drawbacks to it as well. In memory recall tasks and completeness of ideas, paper and pencil usually comes out on top. If there are distractions, it doesn’t matter which method is used because memory suffers either way. Thus, if students need to write quickly or need to have complete sentences such as when composing argumentative writing, then computers are probably best. If students need to learn information, write down complete information, and remember it, then paper in a distraction free environment is probably best.
Reading for Comprehension
When students are reading to learn, factors such as text type, text complexity, digital device, and background knowledge help assess whether digital or print is superior. Reading narrative texts, or texts that tell a story, digitally doesn't have any negative effects on comprehension when compared to print reading according to Schwabe and colleagues (2022) review of thirty-two studies and over 2000 participants total. Further, the device used (computer, laptop, or ereader) to read digitally doesn’t matter when reading narrative texts if the desired outcome is comprehension. However, any kind of digital multimedia features such as images, animations, or dictionaries on the side panels do improve comprehension when present. In the classroom, it shouldn’t make a difference whether narrative texts are presented digitally or in print because comprehension likely won’t suffer, so it makes sense to offer both and let students choose their preference as long as there aren’t other issues like convenience or executive functioning.
Studies of expository texts are varied in their results. Sage et al (2019) found that comprehension didn’t differ across laptops, print, or tablets when the expository text covered a vaguely familiar topic and comprehension was measured by shallow multiple choice questions. A year later though, Sage et al (2020) reported that students reading on ereaders had significantly lower comprehension. Student familiarity with devices could differ between the studies and both of these studies used shallow multiple choice questions to assess comprehension and didn’t test deeper levels of comprehension. Examining print texts have been shown to be better for deeper comprehension such as making inferences (Park & Lee, 2021). If students are reading a text to get a basic understanding, then it probably doesn’t matter whether it’s digital or print. However, if students need to make inferences, judgements, and evaluations of a text on a deeper level, then print is probably best.
Could students interacting with text, such as highlighting, improve a student’s comprehension on digital devices? When students were asked to read and highlight a text, only their comprehension on printed texts went up, not digital. When they didn’t highlight the text, digital comprehension decreased. Thus, highlighting doesn't help comprehend digital text but it does help with print. So, it’s possible that students use different strategies to comprehend digital texts as suggested by Leu et al (2019). It’s important to remember background knowledge will have more impact than whether the text is read digitally or in print because poor readers with more background knowledge will comprehend better than good readers without background knowledge (Recht & Leslie, 1988). Thus, there are other factors that influence comprehension outside of the reading medium.
Conclusion
Looking across contexts, there isn’t a clear winner of either digital or print. It depends on the situation. In most cases, print is better or doesn’t hurt learning. However, in many cases digital learning is about the same as print. Students should be allowed to pick digital or print based on their preference in order to maximize learning (Sage et al, 2019). Further, if students have other needs such as struggling with executive functioning, digital may be advantageous because it’s harder to lose the information. Digital may also create advantages for special populations such as English Learners because words can be defined within a text instead of having to stop and look elsewhere. For students with disabilities, digital allows for easier manipulation of texts such as enlarged fonts for students with dyslexia and visual impairments. Many of the studies mentioned here used undergraduate students at four year colleges and universities. Consequently, there aren’t many participants who are struggling readers, and these findings may be different in that population. Whether print or digital, it is important for educators to keep their end goal in mind.
About the author: Kara Kennedy is a doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction specializing in Literacy Education and a CISLL affiliate.
References
Aragon-Mendisabal, E., Delgado-Casas, C., Navarro-Guzman, J., Menacho-Jimenez, I., & Romero-Oliva, M. (2016). A comparative study of handwriting and computer typing in note-taking by university students. Comunicar, 24(48), 101-110. http://dx.doi.org/10.3916/C48-2016-10
Flanigan, A.E., Kiewra, K.A., Lu, J., & Dzhuraev, D. (2022). Computer versus longhand notetaking: Influence of revision. Instructional Science, 51, 251-284. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-022-09605-5
Leu, D., Kinzer, C.K., Coiro, J., Castek, J., & Henry, L. (2019). New literacies: A dual-level theory of the changing nature of literacy, instruction, and assessment. In D. E. Alvermann, N. J. Unrau, M. Sailors, & R. B. Ruddell (Eds.), Theoretical Models and Processes of Literacy (7th ed., pp. 319-346). Routledge.
Lin, L. & Bigenho, C. (2011). Notetaking and memory in different media environments. Computers in the Schools, 28(3), 200-216. https://doi.org/10.1080/07380569.2011.594989
New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1), 60-92. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.66.1.17370n67v22j160u
Park, J. & Lee, J. (2021). Effects of e-books and printed books on EFL learners’ reading comprehension and grammatical knowledge. English Teaching, 76(3), 35-61. https://doi.org/10.15858/engtea.76.3.202109.35
Recht, D.R. & Leslie, L. (1988). Effect of prior knowledge on good and poor readers’ memory of text. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16-20. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0022-0663.80.1.16
Sage, K., Augustine, H., Shand, H., Bakner, K., & Rayne, S. (2019). Reading from print, computer, and tablet: Equivalent learning in the digital age. Education and Information Technologies, 24(4), 2477-2502. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-019-09887-2
Sage, K., Piazzini, M., Charles Downey IV, J., & Masilela, L. (2020). Reading from print, laptop computer, and e-reader: Differences and similarities for college students’ learning. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 52(4), 441-460. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2020.1713264
Schwabe, A., Lind, F., Kosch, L., & Boomgaarden, H.G. (2022). No negative effects of reading on a screen on comprehension of narrative texts compared to print: A metaanalysis. Media Psychology, 25(6), 779-796. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2022.2070216
No comments:
Post a Comment