By For ‘deeper reading’ among children aged 10-12, paper trumps screens. What does it mean when schools are going digital?
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The Department of Education’s most recent study, declared in June, was surely sensational: it found that text comprehension skills of 13-year-olds had denied an average of four points since the Covid-affected schools in the academic year 2019-2020, and more alarmingly that the average drop was seven points compared with the 2012 figure. The results for the worst-performing students fell below the reading skill level recorded in 1971, when the first national study was conducted.
Unsurprisingly, the blame for this news has been assigned by politicians to the easiest, more obvious targets – Covid-19 and the resultant lockdown. Online learning was bad for students, according to Biden administration officials, so the pandemic must be the chief villain. Conservatives don’t disagree, but they blame the teachers’ unions for cheering their members to teach remotely – for them, The President of American Federation of Teacher’s -Randi Weingarten was greater villain than Covid-19 for shutting down the schools.
Neither the bureaucrats nor the critics of the teachers’ union are wrong, of course. It is common sense that a child alone in her bedroom looking at the image of a teacher on a computer screen (with a smartphone close at hand but hidden from the teacher’s view), cannot concentrate on studies properly.
But while everyone is blaming the lockdown, there’s been little discussion on this topic about the physical object most children use to read, which, starting long before the arrival of Covid, has increasingly been an illuminated screen displaying pixelated type instead of a printed or photocopied text. What if no one is responsible behind the fall of middle-school literacy is neither a virus, nor a union leader, nor “remote learning”?
Since there has been no scientific answer to this question, but soon-to-be published, innovative study from neuroscientists at Columbia University’s Teachers College has come down decisively on the matter: for “deeper reading” there is a clear benefit to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen, where “shallow reading was observed”.
Using a sample of 59 children aged 10 to 12, a team led by Dr Karen Froud asked its subjects to read original texts in both types while wearing hair nets filled with electrodes that permitted the researchers to analyze different types of responses from the children. Performed in a laboratory at Teachers College with strict controls, the study – which has not yet been reviewed – used an ultimate new technique of word association in which the children “performed single-word semantic judgment tasks” after reading the passages.
Froud and her team are careful in their results and reluctant to give suggestion for classroom protocol and curriculum. Nevertheless, the researchers state: “We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices … we think that we should not yet wither away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from printed paper.”
For more than a decade, social researchers, including the Norwegian scholar Anne Mangen, have been reporting on the superiority of reading comprehension and assumption on paper. As Froud’s team says in its article: “Reading both expository and complex texts from paper seems to be consistently associated with deeper comprehension and learning” across the full range of social scientific literature.
But the work of Mangen and others hasn’t effected local school boards, such as Houston’s, which keep withering away printed books and closing libraries in favor of digital teaching programs and Google Chromebooks. Drunk on the magical realism and exaggerated promises of the “digital revolution”, school districts around the country are eagerly converting to computerized test-taking and screen-reading programs at the precise moment while the scientific study is showing that the old-fashioned paper method is better for teaching children how to read.
Lucky, especially for Google, which hoped to sell 600 Chromebooks to the Jericho school district, and since 2020 has sold nearly $14bn worth of the cheap laptops to K-12 schools and universities.
John Gabrieli, an MIT neuroscientist who is skeptical about the promises of big tech and its salesmen: “I am happy that how educational technology has had no effect on scale, on reading outcomes, on reading difficulties, on equity issues,” he told the New York audience.
“How is it that none of it has lifted, on any scale, reading? … It’s like people just say, ‘Here is a product. If you can get it into a thousand classrooms, we’ll make a bunch of money.’ And that’s OK; that’s our system. We just have to find out which technology is helping people more, and then promote that technology over the marketing of technology that has made no difference on behalf of students … It’s all been product and not purpose.”
I’ll only take issue with the notion that it’s “OK” to rob kids of their full intellectual potential in the service of sales – before they even get started understanding what it means to think, let alone read.
