One of my favorite parts of being an English professor has always been the sight of students poring over great works of literature and marking up the pages. Until recently, whether we were dissecting a novel or a play, a poem or a short story, students came to class with a print copy.
A few years ago, however, some students began bringing digital texts. At first I found it disconcerting to see them staring intently at screens, instead of at physical books. But I soon recognized that those students had good reasons to choose digital versions, including their lower cost and their ease of access throughout their day. I still remember having to haul massive literature anthologies across the campus when I was a student, and can definitely see the value of having all of your textbooks contained in a laptop.
Publishers and student-success advocates alike have embraced the shift to digital reading. From various corners of the educational world we read that digital texts can provide better access for an increasingly diverse enrollment, and can help students lower their educational costs. Publishers seem to be listening and responding to student demand. In July 2019, Pearson, the textbook-publishing giant, announced a “Digital First” strategy, noting that e-books would be its top priority, with print versions available only as rentals.
All of that might strike a caring and progressive educator as an unreservedly good thing — unless, that is, we look at what the research tells us about student learning in print versus digital formats. Then the story gets more complicated.
You can find different angles of that story in two recent books, both of which I highly recommend for faculty members who assign readings (which means almost all of us). Both books analyze the differences between print and digital reading:
- How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio, by Naomi S. Baron, was published in March by Oxford University Press.
- Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading, by Jenae Cohn, appeared in June from West Virginia University Press. (Full disclosure: Cohn’s book is part of a teaching-and-learning series that I edit for the press.)
What the research shows. Baron’s book provides a straightforward overview of a growing body of scholarship that explores both how students learn from different types of “texts” (including audio) and how they prefer to read. That research tells a story that educators should consider as they select or create readings for their courses.
An emerita professor of linguistics at American University, in Washington, D.C., Baron has been one of the leading researchers in this area for the past few decades. Her deep engagement with the field means that she acknowledges the complexities, contradictions, and limitations in the research. Yet her conclusions are clear: When it comes to the kind of focused reading that we ask students to complete in service of understanding and remembering course content, print has a substantial advantage over all the other options.
That finding seems to be especially true for longer texts and for narrative-based reading, but Baron reports that, in most studies in this area, print is superior to digital reading for learning purposes. In some contexts, the research shows little or no difference between digital and print, but in almost no cases did digital reading prove the better option for learning.
Print has the edge not only for learning but also in terms of student preferences. Baron has been one of the scholars surveying students about their reading preferences, and the results were a tremendous surprise to me, as I expect they might for most faculty members. If cost were not a factor, 87 percent of surveyed students said they would prefer to read course assignments in print. Why? Because, according to 92 percent of respondents, they concentrate better when they are reading a physical copy.
How well students can concentrate as they read also helps explain the advantage of print for learning. For all of us, reading online means digital distractions are within an easy touch or swipe of the screen. That ease of access impedes our ability to focus while reading to learn.
Baron provides a comprehensive breakdown of the many dozens of studies on this subject, and readers can judge for themselves whether there is — in the words of one theorist she quotes — a “primacy of print.” Her book leans in that direction, but she also points out the benefits of digital reading and acknowledges that it’s clearly here to stay. Cost, convenience, and access are not issues she dismisses or minimizes, nor should we. And plenty of the reading we assign these days might be available only in digital form.
If we assign digital reading to students, Baron argues, we must do a better job of helping them grasp it. Reading in print, on screen, and through audio formats are all very different animals — each with its own challenges and capabilities. But most of the reading strategies that students have been taught in their education — highlighting, annotating a book, taking notes separately — were developed with print text in mind, and don’t always translate to digital reading. Much as we teach students to annotate a print copy, Baron writes, “digital-annotation skills need to be taught and nurtured.”
How to teach digital reading. If you are looking to teach and nurture those skills in your students, pick up Cohn’s Skim, Dive, Surface. Baron provides what struck me as a relatively neutral analysis of the reading-and-learning research. Cohn, director of academic technology at California State University at Sacramento, writes as more of an advocate of effective digital-reading practices and their benefits for students.
In the first half of her book, Cohn reviews the research on print-versus-digital reading and turns a critical lens on some of the studies that have shown the benefits of print reading for learning, questioning their methods or conclusions. Ultimately, however, she does acknowledge the general tenor of that body of research and agrees that print seems to have some clear advantages in the classroom.
But she also highlights the benefits of digital reading and wants students to do it well. Cohn devotes the second half of her book to that charge, offering creative ideas for how instructors can help students read digital material more effectively. She suggests five pathways to effective digital reading and devotes a chapter to each: curation, connection, creativity, contextualization, and contemplation. As I read through those chapters, a physical copy of her book in my hands, I found myself scribbling plenty of notes in the margins about teaching strategies I want to use in my courses next semester.
In the “Connection” chapter, for example, Cohn describes an activity in which students highlight essential content in a digital text and then make connections between that content and material outside the course. Students are first asked to use a digital-annotation tool to “highlight passages that (a) invite them to ask a question, (b) pique their curiosity, (c) remind them of something else they learned in a different class or context, or (d) change their understanding of a concept.” Students then link each highlighted passage to something outside the text. As they are highlighting and hyperlinking, they are connecting the course material to new contexts of their own devising.
Cohn wants faculty members to understand how to help students learn to read digital texts well. But what’s also really useful about Skim, Dive, Surface is that many of the techniques she recommends could be adapted to help students learn to read well in any format. Cohn is a creative pedagogical thinker, and anyone who reads her book should come away with new ideas for their fall courses.
Taken together, the two books give faculty members plenty of food for thought as we consider how to assign or encourage student reading in our courses. As publishers gallop toward digital textbooks, and educational theorists advocate for open digital access, we should remain thoughtful about what our students need — and prefer — for their own learning. A truly equitable and inclusive approach to reading assignments means providing options, and the research makes clear that print should remain one of those options when possible.
I have seen this play out in my own home. My 16-year-old twins provide a study in the contrast between digital and print readers:
- My son spends all his time on screens. He plays video games with his friends and devours social media, but he also reads plenty in places like Reddit. Almost all his reading is short, information-oriented material. He will read a novel in print, but only if I harass him enough about it (and rest assured, this English professor is not above harassing his children to read novels in print).
- My daughter, by contrast, spends half her life draped over a couch or bed, reading print novels. I have always had a standing offer to buy books for my children when they want them; that was my way to encourage reading. I had to rescind that offer with her when her book-buying habit began to exceed my own. “I can’t keep buying you books,” I told her. “Start getting them from the library.” Instead she got a job and now buys her own books. They seem to show up on our doorstep once or twice a week.
When my twins start college, in another year or so, I hope they will have a robust experience of reading in all formats. And I hope their faculty members follow the advice of both Baron and Cohn: Don’t take it for granted that students — simply because they are young and grew up in the digital era — want to do all their reading on screens or that they know how to get the most out of digital reading.