UPDATE: The headline of this story has been altered slightly. It was "Will Ebooks Make Us Dumber?"
A new study out of Europe suggests that readers of print books are at a big advantage to readers of ebooks when it comes to reading comprehension. If this is true, will reading more ebooks and fewer print books as a society make us dumber?
The study tracked 50 readers, half of whom were given a print copy of a short story by author Elizabeth George with the other half given a Kindle to read the story on. While the two groups performed similarly in tests about their comprehension of the story in most measures, those who read the print version were much better at accurately describing the order of certain events in the story.
Researchers theorize that the reason for the discrepancy might be due to readers of a print book being able to feel how far they've gone, giving them a tactile way to mark time and events, something the digital group didn't get with a plastic e-reader. Another theory was that readers just don't digest digital texts the way they do print texts.
Or, it could be that the study is limited.
The 50 participants in the study were culled from among Ph.D. students and post-doctorate students at the laboratory at which the study was conducted, according to the lead researcher, Anne Mangen. Two of the participants had read on a Kindle before.
"Obviously, we cannot say anything from our data in this study how experienced, expert Kindle users would perform. Adequately addressing this issue requires another experiment, using experienced Kindle readers and comparing them with non-experienced Kindle readers," she said, adding that this is an experiment she might perform.
The other 48 participants, particularly the 25 who were in the print group, obviously had ample experience as readers of print texts as adults pursuing doctorates.
Experiments have been conducted for decades comparing reading on screens versus reading in print. Early results suggested very strongly that print had massive advantages. But as time went on, screen reading drew closer to print reading. One theory is that test subjects were more used to the medium as more people read on screens, and that this changed the findings. E-reading is such a new technology and most of the research subjects part of the digital group were unfamiliar with it and with the Kindle device, as opposed to reading in print, which nobody is unfamiliar with.
This, along with a few other important factors, call into question the conclusions being extracted by the researchers and media, according to Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, which has performed many similar research studies around digital reading, focusing on children. Looking at how children read and learn on these new technologies might be a better way of understanding their effect now and in the future.
When performing these kinds of reading studies, researchers must be very careful about paying attention to "content, context and the age of the children."
"It's a very narrow study of the difference in the ability to order a fictional story. We don't know what this means in terms of all sorts of things. For example, does this have any relation to what kids learn when they read online when they're taking a test? There's an issue of looking at fiction versus nonfiction," he said.
More questions: How was the text presented on the page or e-reader? Was it designed well for both?
"I always wonder if readers use print versus digital in different contexts, for example, on the subway, so that impacts their comprehension and experience," said J. Alison Bryant, Ph.D., founder and CEO of PlayCollective, a private consulting firm that studies the effects of digital technologies on children and performs similar experiments. "I can't tell from this if it was a lab study or if they were to read the book on their own and then do the assessment." Another researcher at PlayCollective also pointed out that future experiments should be controlled for the length of the story and exactly how it's presented on screen.
Basically, if this study wants to conclude that for mystery fiction stories, grad students who are not experienced with Kindle devices do not order the events in the story as well after reading on an e-reader versus reading the story in print, it could conclude that.
Well, maybe, according to Levine.
"The conditions of the use are important -- is it for pleasure, school? There's a lot of contextual and conditional questions that aren't raised or answered," he said. "There's a lot of work that needs to be done to sort this out."
Beyond the overreaching conclusions of the study itself, media and observers have gone even farther. "Readers absorb less on Kindles than on paper, study finds" was the headline to the Guardian article breaking the news. Other media followed suit: The Independent, USA Today, and others. Here are a few from last year: "Do e-readers inhibit reading comprehension?" (Salon); and "E-Readers Don’t Cut Down on Reading Comprehension" (Smithsonian).
While it's not a bad strategy if you're trying for clicks -- people are endlessly fascinated by reading habits and their implications (are they making us dumber or smarter? Sexier or dumpier? Happier or sadder?) -- it can detract from larger issues.
According to Levine at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, in one recent survey, all low-income children aged three-to-five who use print books alone under-perform on reading assessments -- that's 100%; meanwhile, only about half of those aged three-to-five who are low-income and read with a mix of digital and print under-perform.
"Five-sixths of low-income minority kids don't read proficiently by age 10, so having access to more reading of any kind for those kids is a positive," he said.
What the right mix of reading is, for both adults and children, is unclear. What is certain is that what we think it is will change and that each individual study should be taken as a data point only, suggesting the path for future research.
"We need to encourage reading in multiple forms," said Levine. "We're cassandras with our heads in the sand if we're going to argue which platform is better at the disservice of encouraging a higher volume of reading."
For further reading on reading and the digital impact, the latest data point to consider is the UK's National Literacy Trust's latest annual report on literacy and children, which came out just this past July. It's free to read here.
