Is Comprehension Better with Digital Text? An Updated Post with New Research

This blog post was first published in October 2018. The reason for the repost is because of the great amount of relevant research that has been published since it first appeared.

Over these six years, there have been seven additional meta-analyses, all but one concluding that we comprehend screens less well than paper (Clinton, 2019 – 29 studies; Delgado, et al., 2018 – 54 studies; Díaz, et al., 2024 — 49 studies; Furenes, et al., 2021 — 39 studies; Kong, et al. 2018 — 17 studies; Öztop, & Nayci, 2021— 12 studies). The one exception found no difference between media with narrative texts, possibly because most readers find these to be relatively easy (Schwabe, Lind, Kosch, & Boomgaarden, 2022). Nevertheless, given the great agreement among meta-analyses, there are individual studies that contradict these conclusions (e.g., Florit, De Carli, Lavelli, & Mason, 2022), the meta-analytic differences are not especially large, and some of these analyses have concluded that students can easily surmount the digital disadvantages they had identified.

Newer studies confirm my introspection — the processing of texts on screens is faster and shallower (e.g., Jensen, Roe, & Blikstad-Balas, 2024). Simply put, we tend to skim more when reading screens and we are less likely to stop and think about what we are reading which limits later memory for the information.

A particularly troubling correlational study reported that the more that students read digital text at school, the lower their resulting reading comprehension. Readers not only comprehend screens more poorly than paper but according to this study, digital reading diminishes comprehension ability (Salmerón, Vargas, Delgado, & Baron, 2023). But, again, there is discrepant information on this point, too, making it uncertain whether digital reading experiences are detrimental in the long run (Hare, Johnson, Vlahiotis, Panda, Tekok Kilic, & Curtin, 2024).  

I’m sticking to my contention that researchers and teachers should be trying to figure out how to prepare kids to read digitally more scrupulously. I am not disputing the new research — I think it’s certain that people read digitally less well, and I’m also concerned that this might hinder how well kids can read in the long run. However, most of my professional reading is now on screens rather than paper, all my newspaper reading is digital, and even much of my entertainment reading takes place on my iPad. Whether we read light beams as well as ink is not the determining factor. Digital reading is on us like white on rice, and we’d better prepare students for success in this electron-driven literacy universe.

Teacher question

Do we read digitally as well as we read paper texts?

Shanahan’s response

I’ve been asked this provocative question three times in three weeks. Once I was presenting a workshop on how to teach college-bound high-schoolers to handle complex text on tests like the ACT. This group wanted to know if it mattered whether students were tested digitally or with paper. Testing studies report performance differences favoring paper.

Last week, I was on a panel at Reading is Fundamental’s National Reading Coalition, a meeting of literacy providers, policymakers, and business leaders. This time the question was posed by Kathleen Ryan-Mufson, Director of Global Citizenship for Pitney-Bowes, a major player in digital communications. She wanted to know about the importance of digital literacy in learning, which opens issues of access, precision of understanding, and student preference.

Then Friday, I was with a particularly thoughtful group of middle-school teachers in Indiana. They asked the question straight-up and were pretty sure that digital was better than paper because of technological affordances, such as easy in-text access to a dictionary, and because these kids are growing up digitally (the so-called “digital natives”).

Must be something in the water.

My answer: We don’t read as well digitally as we do on paper. When texts are short – a page or less — and comprehension demands light (what’s the main idea?), we do pretty well with either kind of text. But as learning demands increase and the texts are more extensive, paper wins hands down.

Like those Indiana teachers, students tend to think they read best digitally; but tests of their comprehension reveal that they are wrong.

Years ago, knowing such questions would come my way, I did some self-study. I read a novel silently, usually prior to bedtime; I read one aloud to my youngest daughter; I listened to one on “Books on Tape” when I drove to work; and I read Dracula on my computer (thanks, Gutenberg Project).

My personal sense of the matter was that I was hurrying when I was reading digitally. As with current research findings, I was fine with major plot points, but it seemed like my understanding was fragile and not very deep. For me, at that time, reading online was more like skimming than reading. I was moving too fast.

Since then, technology has improved, and I’ve grown used to such reading. Engineers have improved digital texts, in lots of ways. We can now download texts so that we’re no longer “online.” Page sizes and formatting are more like those of real books; and screen illumination is better, too.

There are even ways in which tech books are demonstrably better. I can increase font sizes (which, at my age, I love) and I can set screen illumination so that I can read with the lights out and Cyndie can sleep. I spend a lot of time on airplanes and portability matters, so being able to bring along tech’s version of a dozen books and as many magazines is a definite win.

These days I often read digitally, for work and pleasure, much more often.

Nevertheless, reading digitally is still a different experience.

One loses the sensory pleasures of the page, and navigation can be disorienting. I can’t always go back and locate what I’m looking for. I still have a sense that I’m going too fast and, perhaps, reading too superficially. Though that just might be me. Research found older readers do make shorter fixations when reading digitally, but that wasn’t true of younger readers (Kretzshmar, et al., 2013).

Dillon (1992) and Singer and Alexander (2017) have conducted the most complete and thorough meta-analyses of the issues; the former looking at all the pre-1992 studies, and latter all the work since Dillon.

Both meta-analyses concluded that we don’t comprehend digital as well as paper, and that the disparity is as true for so-called “digital natives” as for people like me (“digital geezers?”).

Apparently scrolling a screen is more memory disruptive than simply turning a page. Digital reading is also often interrupted by multi-tasking (Baron, 2015): 67% of readers don’t last ten minutes before they’re messaging or shopping during reading!

Of course, this is all a bit complicated. Reading a PDF file on one’s computer is different from reading a test passage on an online state exam or from reading Prairie Fires for pleasure on my I-Pad. They differ in navigability, user friendliness, and how likely one is to be tempted to do other things instead of reading.

No, comprehension is not always suppressed or limited by digital text, but it happens often enough that we should be concerned. One study found students grasped the major plot points of a story digitally but that they were deficient when it came to making connections of other text points with the plot (Mangen, Walgermo, & Brønnick, 2013).

Maryanne Wolf (2018) agonized over the potential losses to patience, persistence, and depth of thought that could result from a daily diet of the short, peripatetic text excursions characteristic of much digital reading.

Oh, and may I add that lots of people don’t enjoy reading digitally as much as they do paper texts. (The last couple of Scholastic surveys reported that the overwhelming majority of kids much prefer books.)

Digital reading is superficial, less understandable, and less enjoyable for most people. Sounds like we should get rid of it. Only fools would invest in digital texts for their instructional programs, right?

I strongly disagree.

Digital text is here to stay. There are all kinds of economic and social reasons why this is likely true, but what matters is that if I’m correct, then kids — all of us really — are going to need to learn to read such texts effectively.

Two things must happen:

First, many other writers (e.g., Boone & Higgins, 2007; Jabr, 2013; Kieffer & Reinking, 2006; Talaka, et al., 2015) have argued that tech engineers should continue to beaver away at making digital reading environments more supportive. Instead of trying to make tech readers prefer books, they should think about producing better digital tools. Tech environments seem to alter reading behavior. Perhaps technological modifications could slow us down or get us to move around a text more productively.  

Second, we as teachers need to make students aware of their tech fallibility. Instead of romanticizing the tech savviness of everyone born since the first Apple sprung from the head of Steve Jobs, we should be teaching humility. Young people aren’t as good with these tools as they think they are, and the digital tools, while solving some problems, pose others.  

Kids vary in their ability to locate information on Google, to evaluate such information, or to understand it. Basic reading comprehension ability helps with these things, as does amount of world knowledge; but even when those are high, students struggle to take advantage of the affordances of digital text or even to comprehend what they read digitally.

Interestingly, not everyone’s comprehension is impaired by digital text. Singer and Alexander (2016) found a group of college students who did better; they slowed themselves and became more careful when reading digitally — unlike me and most of the students they studied.

We should be teaching students strategies for digital reading, fostering ways of reading that allow students to overcome the limits of how they adapt their reading behaviors to the screens. We should also teach them efficient ways of navigating in different screen environments (e.g., arrows, site maps, breadcrumb trails, non-linear navigation), and how to evaluate the trustworthiness of the digital information they read.

Students don’t comprehend digital text as well as they do paper text. But they must and they could. 

References

Baron, N. S. (2015). Words onscreen: The fate of reading in a digital world. Oxford University Press.

Clinton, V. (2019). Reading from paper compared to screens: A systematic review and meta?analysis. Journal of Research in Reading, 42(2), 288–325. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12269

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(1), 23-38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003

Díaz, B., Nussbaum, M., Greiff, S., & Santana, M. (2024). The role of technology in reading literacy: Is Sweden going back or moving forward by returning to paper-based reading? Computers & Education, 213, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2024.105014

Dillon, A. (1992). Reading from paper versus screens: a critical review of the empirical literature. Ergonomics, 35(10), 1297–1326. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140139208967394

Florit, E., De Carli, P., Lavelli, M., & Mason, L. (2022). Digital reading in beginner readers: Advantage or disadvantage for comprehension of narrative and informational linear texts? Journal of Computer Assisted Learning. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcal.12754

Furenes, M. I., Kucirkova, N., & Bus, A. G. (2021). A comparison of children’s reading on paper versus screen: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 91(4), 483-517. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654321998074

Hare, C., Johnson, B., Vlahiotis, M., Panda, E. J., Tekok Kilic, A., & Curtin, S. (2024). Children’s reading outcomes in digital and print mediums: A systematic review. Journal of Research in Reading. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9817.12461

Kong, Y., Seo, Y. S., & Zhai, L. (2018). Comparison of reading performance on screen and on paper: A meta-analysis. Computers and Education, 123, 138-149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.05.005

Kretzschmar, F., Pleimling, D., Hosemann, J., Füssel, S., Borkessel-Schlesewsky, I., & Schlesewsky, M. (2013). Subject impressions do not mirror online reading effort: Concurrent EEG-Eyetracking evidence from the reading of books and digital media. PLOS One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056178

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. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2012.12.002

Öztop, F., & Nayci, Ö. (2021). Does the digital generation comprehend better from the screen or from the paper?: A meta-analysis. International Online Journal of Education and Teaching, 8(2), 1206-1224. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1294459

Salmerón, L., Vargas, C., Delgado, P., & Baron, N. (2023). Relation between digital tool practices in the language arts classroom and reading comprehension scores. Reading and Writing, 36(1), 175–194. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10295-1

Schwabe, A., Lind, F., Kosch, L., & Boomgaarden, H. G. (2022). No negative effects of reading on screen on comprehension of narrative texts compared to print: A meta-analysis. Media Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2022.2070216

Singer, L. M., & Alexander, P. A. (2017). Reading on paper and digitally: What the past decades of empirical research reveal. Review of Educational Research, 87(6), 1007-1041. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654317722961

Stiegler-Balfour, J., Roberts, Z. S., LaChance, A. S., Sahouria, A. M., & Newborough, E. D. (2023). Is reading under print and digital conditions really equivalent? Differences in reading and recall of expository text for higher and lower ability comprehenders. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 176, 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103036

Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, come home: The reading brain in a digital world. New York: Harper.