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
BY MICHELE E. EATON/School Administrator, May 2020

Reading online diminishes comprehension because the text is typically scanned rather than read. Note-taking during online reading improves comprehension.

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.

Using Digital Text

If our comprehension takes a hit when we read online, shouldn’t we just stick with print text?

Consider this test: Pause reading this article for a moment. Grab a Post-it note or a piece of paper and jot down all the different types of text you have read in the last two or three days. Consider the books, articles, magazines, e-mails, text messages and social media posts. Presumably, you interacted with various digital and print media. The amount of digital text we consume is constantly growing. Reading means reading on a screen, too. If we want to prepare students for the texts they will have to read deeply, we have to engage them in both print and digital text.

The upside is there is a lot of research available about how certain reading strategies can close that comprehension gap between print and digital media. We do not have to sacrifice understanding and deep reading simply because we use electronic texts. That means we cannot approach reading in the same way online as we do in print.

Some reading strategies can be incorporated for reading online material to help disrupt the pattern of skimming text and help our students learn to read deeply online.

Note-Taking

Patricia Marks Greenfield, a developmental psychologist at UCLA, found in her 2013 research on reading digital text that taking notes on paper while reading significantly improved reading comprehension. Part of the reason this is so helpful is that it creates a roadmap of digital reading that makes up for the lack of spatial information we have while reading online, according to a study published in Research in Learning Technology in November 2017.

Scrolling down a page makes it difficult to visualize where you are in a text. Literacy consultant Kristina Smekens, in her article “Maximize On-Screen Reading Time,” states, “If students don’t know where they are in the text while reading, they will have an even harder time going back and finding the information after reading.”

Smekens, a former high school journalism teacher, suggests using physical paper to take note of important details in a list. This list becomes a visual roadmap for the digital text, helping students track their reading. In this case, mixing technology and pa-per/pencil activities allows for the best of both worlds. Teachers can use digital text with all of its multimedia enhancements without sacrificing comprehension.

Collaborative Documents

Additional research presented at the 9th Chais Conference for the Study of Innovation and Learning Technologies in 2014 found that students who use digital reading platforms with built-in annotation capabilities do not experience the dip in reading comprehension. However not all teachers have access to this kind of reading software. Free annotation tools are available through Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive.

Copying digital texts into these collaborative documents enables students to use the comments feature, highlight text and mark up the document. When you do this, it is important to provide proper attribution and ensure that you are not violating copyright or fair use. Once a digital text is in a collaborative document, teachers can easily facilitate close reading activities that help students read deeply.

Headings and Highlights

Devin Hess, director of technology integration for the University of California Berkeley History-Social Science Project, came up with a reading strategy called Headings and Highlights. This is a powerful tool for digital reading when copying an article into a collaborative document.

Hess recommends copying a digital text into the collaborative document, then removing all headings. Students do two readings of the text. On the first reading, they use the highlighting tool to mark important information. On the second reading, students re-read the highlights and write their own headings into the article.

This strategy ensures students do more than simply scan the text, encouraging a deeper reading of the material. It is also a quick formative assessment for teachers as they can scan the students’ headings to see if they understood the gist of the writing.

SQ3R Strategy

Another great active reading strategy that can be easily paired with digital text is called SQ3R. This five-step strategy includes: Scan (skim the document for a quick overview); Question (formulate questions you have after scanning the text); Read (do a thorough reading of the text, using the highlighter tool to highlight and the comments feature to annotate); Review (review the notes or discuss them with a classmate); and Recall (write down the most important information, big ideas or main idea).

When I use this strategy, I create text boxes in the document to provide specific places for students to write their questions and to summarize. All of this can be done directly in the collaborative document where I placed the digital text.

Choosing Texts

The modern classroom has a place for both print and digital media. Just because we face challenges with introducing a different type of text to our students does not mean we must completely avoid all digital material. In fact, it is important for teachers to intentionally teach students the differences between print and online text and create opportunities for students to read and comprehend all text at a deep level.

Educators ought to assume responsibility for preparing students for reading in a digital age, and that should include both print and online text.

MICHELE EATON is director of virtual and blended learning in the Metropolitan School District of Wayne Township in Indianapolis, Ind. She is the author of The Perfect Blend: A Practical Guide to Designing Student-Centered Learning Experiences. E-mail: michele.eaton@wayne.k12.in.us. Twitter: @micheeaton