Education Policy, Business and Technology

What We Still Don't Know About Digital Reading

Education Week: Every day, students consume hundreds of words on their iPads, mobile phones, Chromebooks, and Kindles. Increasingly, educational publishers are delivering curriculum on these devices, including several start-ups focused on getting informational texts and news stories into students' hands. But fundamentally, is reading online different from using the old class copies of Ethan Frome or The Federalist Papers?

As it turns out, what we don't know outweighs what we do know about how people comprehend texts on a digital screen rather than on the printed page, a new research review concludes.

There's some good evidence that readers seem to process longer texts for understanding better in print than digitally, but beyond that there are a lot of question marks, concludes the review, which was published online in July in the Review of Educational Research.

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