In the 1980s, Norway was quick to prioritize the use of computers in its classrooms. During the early 2000s, the country’s government declared the use of digital technologies a basic skill—as necessary as the ability to read, write, and do arithmetic—and for the past decade, Norwegian students have done most of their coursework on tablets and laptops.
A big reason for this reversal is the relatively poor reading performance of Norwegian students.
These findings have helped fuel calls from Norwegian parents for schools to roll back the use of screen-based tools and to reprioritize old-school book reading—a trend that is also picking up steam among American parents and lawmakers. Across the U.S., new legislative proposals seek to cap screen-based learning in favor of more traditional pencil-and-paper education.
For one recent study, she and colleagues had a small group of eighth-grade students read two short sections of text—one about a walrus, one about a beetle—of text either on a screen or on paper. The students wore eye-tracking glasses while reading, which allowed the researchers to collect data on how the students’ attention moved over the text. Reading comprehension—the students’ ability to correctly answer questions about what they’d just read—was significantly lower when the students read on screens. The researchers also found that the number of “transitions,” where students would go back and re-read the text before submitting their answers, more than doubled—and in some cases tripled—when kids read on screens.
While this finding was unsurprising, she says it refutes some criticisms of older screen-vs.-paper reading research. “Some have said, well, people grow up reading on paper, not screens, so of course they’ll do better [in that medium],” she says. “The children in this particular study grew up in mostly digital learning environments,” she continues. “If anybody should be better at reading on screens, these kids should. And they’re not.”
How might reading on screens create comprehension shortfalls compared to reading on paper? There are two leading explanations.
The second explanation has to do with the busy, distraction-heavy nature of online information. “When you read things on the internet, a lot of what you’re doing is choosing what not to read and what not to look at,” Blikstad-Balas explains. When people spend a lot of time in that kind of reading environment, they may be training themselves to skim and skip around whenever they encounter screen-based text—even when skimming and skipping is unhelpful. In other words, shallow reading becomes a habit.
But such small differences may snowball into larger deficits. “Reading ability is cumulative and develops through the whole life cycle,” he explains. “If every opportunity a person has to read, they’re engaging in this shallow, scanning kind of reading, their skills may never evolve to allow for comprehension of more complex ideas or syntactical structures.”
It’s possible that newer educational technologies may find ways to remedy these apparent problems. But the bigger lesson may be that for all their sophistication, the latest digital devices aren’t necessarily improvements over older, analog forms of learning.
“With technology, the bar has been set very high to doubt it or to pull it out [of classrooms] in favor of traditional methods,” Blikstad-Balas says. “It should be the other way around.”
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