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"We don't want to have people say that these findings say these schools aren't doing RTI right; this turns out to be what RTI looks like when it plays out in daily life."

"Students are missing a lot of broader things that are going to make a difference in their ability to put it all together in functional reading."

students with "mild and relatively mild learning problems" are not representative anymore of the students targeted for Tier 2 interventions. "Over time, in many places what's happened is RTI has been deliberately used as a kind of general education substitution for special education. My strong sense is that over time, more and more kids with greater and greater severity of learning problems are being served in an RTI framework."

If the new trend in textbooks is moving them to computer screens, the switch could have negative consequences as many suggest that people skim more, process more shallowly, and may retain less information when reading online, Daniel said.

he readers’ goals are different: Individuals reading an e-book for enjoyment aren’t required to pass a comprehension-based test afterward. While they found that learning is possible from both formats, learning from e-textbooks takes longer and requires more effort to reach the same level of understanding, even in a controlled lab environment. At home, students report taking even more time to read e-textbooks as well as higher rates of muti-tasking (e.g., Facebook, electronic chat, texting, email, etc.) than do their peers using printed textbooks.

In their preliminary findings, the scanning pattern produced when the student read a textbook showed consistent reading from line to line down the page. But the scanning pattern from reading on the screen was less intense.

Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem,

The findings align with other emerging research on how students process information differently in print and digital forms. A 2014 series of experiments found that while taking more notes overall was better than taking fewer, students who typed notes on their laptops rather than writing them on paper tended to take down information verbatim rather than summarizing concepts, and the more students wrote verbatim, the less they remembered a week later. 

For example, she said, teachers should consider the format of information when designing different types of activities, to help students focus on details or overall themes. 

Those factors include integrating technology into intervention classes; setting aside time for professional learning and collaboration for teachers; allowing students to use technology to collaborate; integrating technology into core curricula at least weekly; administering online formative assessments at least weekly; lowering the student-to-computer ratio as much as possible; using virtual field trips at least monthly; encouraging students to use search engines daily; and providing training for principals on how to encourage best practices for technology implementation. Only about 1 percent of the 1,000 schools surveyed by Project RED followed all those steps, and those that did “saw dramatic increases in student achievement and had revenue-positive experiences,” Ms. Wilson said.

The study followed people who used computer screens for learning versus paper reading to learn, and found that while screen learning helped solidify the details of the learning, paper reading helped readers better understand abstract concepts.

Better put, concrete memory from reading involves the who and when, whereas abstract concepts tend to lean towards where and why.

The results showed that abstract thinking was impacted by computer screens but concrete memory was not.