It'a All About Reading

From a perspective of 48 years as an educator – English teacher, School Committee Chair, administrator in 3 states, a RI Superintendent of Schools, 12 years as an Adjunct Professor of Writing at RWU – I found Education Week’s October 5, 2019 article “How Do Kids Learn to Read? What the Science Says” both confirming and troubling.

Within the past 5years, I have observed a decline in students’ ability to analyze and internalize the substance of what they read.

Sarah Schwartz and Sarah D. Sparks state the problem clearly: 

Does it make a difference whether children learn to read using printed books or digital ones?

In the last decade or so, access to Internet-based text has continued to expand, and schools have increasingly used digitally based books, particularly to support students who do not have easy access to paper books at home. Yet some emerging evidence suggests children learn to read differently in print versus digitally, in ways that could hinder their later comprehension.

Researchers that study eye movements find that those reading digital text are more likely to skim or read nonlinearly, looking for key words to give the gist, jump to the end to find conclusions or takeaways, and only sometimes go back to find context in the rest of the text. In a separate series of studies since 2015, researchers led by Anne Mangen found that students who read short stories and especially longer texts in a print format were better able to remember the plot and sequence of events than those who read the same text on a screen.

It’s not yet clear how universal these changes are, but teachers may want to keep watch on how well their students reading electronically are developing deeper reading and comprehension skills.

At RWU, I have surveyed classes regarding quiz preparation, asking how many scanned the reading digitally, how many highlighted a printed copy, and how many took notes. Universally the last group achieved better results.

With this kind of evidence, I am dismayed at the direction of our schools in replacing print with technology.

Lest I be misunderstood, I have used a computer as a teaching tool since 1989 when I last taught high school Journalism. I believe technology is vital in teaching math, some of the sciences, and the like. However, substituting computers for books in the liberal arts has undermined the acquisition of reading skills and resulted in declining English/Language Arts test scores.

It is true that the cost of textbooks has skyrocketed. However, the cost for books for an entire classroom – even with replacement costs – compares favorably with the cost and maintenance of classroom computers - especially when schools can get quality paperbacks instead of bound books from high-priced textbook publishers.

If educators are serious about increasing student skills (and improving test scores along the way), they need to take a more realistic look at instruction.  Teachers don’t want to be computer monitors. They have been trained to teach. Give them the appropriate tools to do their jobs.