It’s better to review your lessons in a notebook than on your phone. According to a study published December 12 in the Review of Educational Research, reading printed text promotes comprehension more than reading on a screen.
Researchers from the University of Valencia analyzed more than twenty studies on reading comprehension published between 2000 and 2022, in which nearly 470,000 participants participated. They concluded that, over a long period of time, reading printed materials can improve comprehension skills six to eight times compared to reading on a screen.
“The association between the frequency of digital reading for leisure and text comprehension skills is close to zero,” Ladislao Salmerón, a professor at the University of Valencia and co-author of the article, told The Guardian.
diagonal reading
The explanation could come from “the linguistic quality of digital texts” which “tends to be lower than that traditionally found in printed texts,” according to the researcher. Texts read on social media, for example, are written in everyday, even colloquial, language and may lack complex syntax or reasoning.
However, Ladislao Salmerón points out that the comprehension deficit occurs regardless of the type of text read on the screen, whether social networks or educational sites such as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. “We expected these sites to be much more positively associated with text comprehension, but our data indicate that this is not the case,” he explains.
The Spanish researcher also states that a person who reads on a screen is in a different “state of mind” than someone who reads a book. In particular, he will have a greater tendency to read diagonally, “without fully immersing himself in the narrative,” which prevents him from “fully grasping the complex relationships of an informational text.”
More distracted children
According to the authors of the study, the quality of comprehension of text read on the screen is particularly low among children, who are easily distracted by videos or notifications that can disturb reading.
“We know that our ability to regulate our cognition evolves during adolescence. Young children may not be fully equipped to self-regulate their activity during leisure digital reading,” explains Ladislao Salmerón.
Finally, the authors reveal that children who frequently read on digital media run the risk of learning less vocabulary “at a critical period in which they transition from learning to read to reading for the sake of learning.”
Source: BFM TV
