Well, buckle up, parents and teachers! There’s a new sheriff in town, and it’s not an app or a fancy digital gadget.
A groundbreaking study just threw a curveball into the whole “screens are the future of education” narrative. Brace yourselves because it turns out that kids might learn better with good ol’ paper and ink.
The study’s eye-opener
Recently, headline writers, educators, and government bureaucrats have become aware of, if not concerned about, the countrywide decline in reading scores among American youth.
The most recent survey from the Department of Education was released in June, and it was certainly shocking: it revealed that 13-year-olds’ text comprehension skills had decreased by an average of four points since the 2019–2020 school year that was impacted by COVID, and, even more concerning, that the average drop had increased by seven points when compared to the 2012 figure. The lowest-performing kids’ results were below the reading proficiency level noted in the first nationwide study, which was carried out in 1971.
Politicians have, predictably, shifted the responsibility for this depressing news onto the simplest, most visible targets: Covid and the lockdown that followed. Officials from the Biden administration claimed that remote learning was detrimental to students, therefore the pandemic had to be the main bad guy.
Though they don’t disagree, conservatives would rather hold the teachers’ unions accountable for pushing their members to work remotely. To them, Randi Weingarten, the strong Democrat who led the AFT and successfully lobbied to extend school closures, is a bigger villain than Covid.
Naturally, neither the bureaucrats nor the teachers’ union detractors are in error. Why? Well, because it is obvious that a youngster who is by herself in her bedroom, staring at the computer screen of a teacher while keeping a smartphone out of the teacher’s line of sight, is not paying close attention to what she is studying.
While everyone is lamenting the lockdown, there hasn’t been much conversation in this debate about the physical device that most kids use to read—an illuminated screen that shows pixelated type instead of printed or photocopied text—which has been the standard for reading for a long time, even before Covid arrived. What if “remote learning,” union leaders, or viruses aren’t the main causes of the decline in middle-school literacy?
The war between paper and screens, do we have a culprit though?
There hasn’t been a scientific response to this pressing question until recently, but a groundbreaking study by neuroscientists at Columbia University’s Teachers College, which is about to be published, will make a clear conclusion: reading a text on paper promotes “deeper reading” compared to reading it on a screen, where “shallow reading was observed.”
A team under the direction of Dr. Karen Froud requested 59 kids in the age range of 10 to 12 to read original texts in both forms while donning hair nets loaded with electrodes so the researchers could examine differences in the kids’ brain activity. The study employed a completely novel approach to word association in which the kids “performed single-word semantic judgement tasks” after reading the passages. It was carried out under stringent controls in a Teachers College laboratory.
The age of the participants was key to the study’s use since fourth grade marks a significant transition from what another researcher refers to as “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”
Throughout the entirety of the social science literature, reading both complicated and expository texts from paper appears to be consistently connected with higher comprehension and learning, as Froud’s team implies in the study.
So, do we all agree that printed material beats digital content?
The proof is in the pudding. Yet another recent meta-analysis of the relationship between leisure reading and understanding reveals that print is six times more effective at improving comprehension abilities than digital information, supporting earlier findings that print outperforms digital content in this regard. Even though a lot of schools now use computers, e-readers, and tablets to instruct students, some experts worry that this could be counterproductive to learning.
A review of 25 studies involving 470,000 students revealed that digital reading negatively affected elementary and middle school students’ understanding. According to Yahoo News, reading on screens was still far less useful than print, even though it had a more positive impact on high school and university pupils.
As mentioned earlier, scientists predict that a student’s comprehension will be six to eight times higher after ten hours of free reading in print than after the same amount of time spent on digital devices. Books are more likely to encourage the kind of “deep reading” that serves as the basis for critical thinking, according to experts, which could be something most of us can vouch for as well.
Closing thoughts
One thing is certain as the educational community considers the implications of this ground-breaking study: the debate about the use of technology in education is far from done. The study’s conclusions question the present status quo and implore educators and other stakeholders to reevaluate how much emphasis is placed on digital and traditional learning resources.
The education system may adjust to these discoveries and carry on evolving in the quest for ideal learning outcomes with careful thought, strategic planning, and dedication to the best interests of students.
(Tashia Bernardus)