Reading and reading.....

I started to read heavily, if not profusely, when I was a child. Someone suggested it would help my pathetic spelling, and it did. Now I'm cursed by pathetic typing skills, and the scourge of Autocorrect. But my personal library is in the hundreds of books, not counting the stuff I've given away, lost over the years, etc.

I personally use digital media for magazines, but generally not for books. If the book is for distraction (I'm really enjoying the Harry Bosch series), digits are great. I can read them everywhere, on my iPad, or my iPhone, or Mac, and if I have 5 minutes to kill, I can get a page or two down. But for more serious reading, I prefer paper. One, I'm slowed down in my reading, and that forces me to concentrate more. Two, I just love to see a bookshelf filled with some books I've conquered over the ages. I can look from where I'm sitting and see multiple columns of Tom Clancy, Mark Levin, the Time-Life series on Vietnam, and many others.

Now comes the a survey showing what should be intuitive. People learn better with paper than digits. Pesonally I've always known that. I like to be able to read, stop, re-read, highlight, put a paper clip on the page, and come back to the item. Can't really do that with digits, in spite of what Millennials say.

With that as comment, I find this interesting.

A new study shows that students learn way more effectively from print textbooks than screens

Today's students see themselves as digital natives, the first generation to grow up surrounded by technology like smartphones, tablets and e-readers.

Teachers, parents and policymakers certainly acknowledge the growing influence of technology and have responded in kind. We've seen more investment in classroom technologies, with students now equipped with school-issued iPads and access to e-textbooks.

In 2009, California passed a law requiring that all college textbooks be available in electronic form by 2020; in 2011, Florida lawmakers passed legislation requiring public schools to convert their textbooks to digital versions.

Given this trend, teachers, students, parents and policymakers might assume that students' familiarity and preference for technology translates into better learning outcomes. But we've found that's not necessarily true.

As researchers in learning and text comprehension, our recent work has focused on the differences between reading print and digital media. While new forms of classroom technology like digital textbooks are more accessible and portable, it would be wrong to assume that students will automatically be better served by digital reading simply because they prefer it...

Speed - at a cost

Our work has revealed a significant discrepancy. Students said they preferred and performed better when reading on screens. But their actual performance tended to suffer.

For example, from our review of research done since 1992, we found that students were able to better comprehend information in print for texts that were more than a page in length. This appears to be related to the disruptive effect that scrolling has on comprehension. We were also surprised to learn that few researchers tested different levels of comprehension or documented reading time in their studies of printed and digital texts.

To explore these patterns further, we conducted three studies that explored college students' ability to comprehend information on paper and from screens.

Students first rated their medium preferences. After reading two passages, one online and one in print, these students then completed three tasks: Describe the main idea of the texts, list key points covered in the readings and provide any other relevant content they could recall. When they were done, we asked them to judge their comprehension performance.

Across the studies, the texts differed in length, and we collected varying data (e.g., reading time). Nonetheless, some key findings emerged that shed new light on the differences between reading printed and digital content:

- Students overwhelming preferred to read digitally.

- Reading was significantly faster online than in print.

- Students judged their comprehension as better online than in print.

- Paradoxically, overall comprehension was better for print versus digital reading.

- The medium didn't matter for general questions (like understanding the main idea of the text).

- But when it came to specific questions, comprehension was significantly better when participants read printed texts...

A few more details on the link, but for me at least, digits will never replace paper. For the reasons above, the pure pleasure of reading, and the occasional distraction of walking into a book store, and getting lost in possibilities. Sorry Amazon.com, you don't do that for me! :<)