Do e-readers inhibit reading comprehension? - Salon.com - 0 views
-
Especially intricate characters — such as Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji — activate motor regions in the brain involved in forming those characters on paper: The brain literally goes through the motions of writing when reading, even if the hands are empty. Researchers recently discovered that the same thing happens in a milder way when some people read cursive.
-
Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared.
-
We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
- ...7 more annotations...
-
Students who read the texts on computers performed a little worse than students who read on paper
-
screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control
-
people consistently say that when they really want to dive into a text, they read it on paper
-
Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences typically associated with reading — especially tactile experiences — matter to people more than one might assume.
-
People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant.
-
Paper books also have an immediately discernible size, shape and weight
-
asked 50 British college students to read study material from an introductory economics course either on a computer monitor or in a spiral-bound booklet. After 20 minutes of reading Garland and her colleagues quizzed the students with multiple-choice questions. Students scored equally well regardless of the medium, but differed in how they remembered the information.
-
"...evidence...indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper."
