I’d guess there aren’t too many educators who are unaware of the research suggesting that using marijuana or drinking alcohol may limit learning outcomes. Using marijuana can impair short term memory and concentration and blood alcohol content (BAC) readings between 0.09 and 0.25% are associated with impaired memory and comprehension.
The ways in which alcohol and drug use can limit learning and comprehension are common knowledge amongst educators. Any proposal to introduce marijuana and or alcohol for student use at school is likely to be rejected by governments, parents, educators or students.
The research that suggests reading from a screen is different from reading from print resources seems less well known.
The ways in which reading from a screen can limit learning and comprehension is not common knowledge for governments, parents, educators, students or sales representatives. Any caveat over readability issues and the betrayal of learning outcomes is largely ignored.
Educators have instead focused their attention on the research that suggests the personal use of mobile devices is on the rise, and on the growing resource of educational resources available for students to access on mobile devices. Refer Horizon 2011 Report pdf
For example, notable New Zealand e-learning conferences like ULearn and Learning at School widely cite the future trendiness and ubiquity of mobile technologies - I have yet to nudge up against a keynote speaker who references readability issues when reading online.
Indeed it is the ubiquitous nature of mobile technologies that provides the rationale behind many educational proposals to increase student access to mobile devices. At the start of the school year in NZ the edu Twitter stream was awash with primary school teachers announcing the arrival of class sets of mobile devices (IPads and iPods) for student use in schools.
In embracing ubiquity as a rationale for implementation we neglect to ask about the stuff that matters most – learning outcomes.
How many discussions around the introduction of mobile technologies to primary schools sees BOT, principals and senior management, educators, parents, students and sales representatives discussing the implications for student learning outcomes before the decision is made to purchase and introduce a mobile screen?
Neil Postman alerted us to the importance of looking at what is enhanced and what is betrayed when we adopt technological solutions a long time ago – check out his essay on the five things we need to know about technological change.
So why aren’t we more curious about how learning outcomes might be betrayed by the use of mobile technologies?
Why don’t we look for the research findings around learning outcomes when students read from a desktop screen or from a mobile device and how these might compare with reading from print?
Anne Mangen’s 2008 exploration into reading with new technologies asks the question that more of us should be exploring as we introduce mobile technologies into classrooms.
How does digital technology change the way we read?
You can access her thinking here in Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion Journal of Research in Reading, Volume 31, Issue 4, 2008, pp 404–419 pdf
Do we neglect to look at the learning outcomes because of the din from the advertising and media narratives? Or are we naively seduced by the e-marketeers?
“We approach our technologies through a battery of advertising and media narratives; it is hard to think above the din.” Turkle, Sherry. (Ed.). The inner history of devices. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. p4
For whatever the reason we cannot ignore that print reading is different from screen reading – and Dr Jacob Nielsen’s research into web usability is the perfect place for curious educators to find out why
Exploring the research around readability issues leads me to raise many questions about the introduction of mobile technologies for primary and secondary students with varying levels of literacy.
What does it mean for primary and secondary students using mobile technologies in schools if a quick exploration of the research on reader usability shows that;
1. Text comprehension drops when we read on mobile devices. The ability to comprehend complex web content drops by more than half if adults are asked to do this on an iPhone sized screen.
Research using a Cloze test shows that comprehension scores for adults reading complex web content on an iPhone-sized screen is 48% comprehension scores obtained when reading from a desktop monitor.
Singh, R. I., Sumeeth, M., & Miller, J. (2011). Evaluating the Readability of Privacy Policies in Mobile Environments. International Journal of Mobile Human Computer Interaction (IJMHCI), 3(1), 55-78. doi:10.4018/jmhci.2011010104
If we assume that this research can be generalised to primary and secondary students we can ask
How will the readability issues of online texts on mobile technologies with smaller screen sizes – reduced comprehension - affect the learning outcomes of students?
2. Reading text (long-form) is slower on tablets (iPad, Kindle) than reading print text for adults (with at least high school levels of literacy).
Research on reading speeds (July 2010) suggests that reading on paper is between 10% to 30% faster than reading online. (For recent reserach try Jakob Nielsen and from the past - try Kurniawan, S., and P Zaphiris (2001) Reading Online or on Paper: Which is Faster? In Proceedings of the 9 th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction.)
If we assume that this research can be generalised to primary and secondary students we can ask …
How will the readability issues of online texts on mobile technologies - reduced reading speeds – affect the learning outcomes of students?
3. Adults with low literacy levels show markedly different reading behaviours when reading on the screen than high literacy users.
Research conducted for Pizer describes how adults with low literacy levels “plow text rather than scan it, and they miss page elements due to a narrower field of view”. Jacob Nielsen 2005
The most notable difference between lower- and higher-literacy users is that lower-literacy users can't understand a text by glancing at it. They must read word for word and often spend considerable time trying to understand multi-syllabic words.Lower-literacy users focus exclusively on each word and slowly move their eyes across each line of text. In other words, they "plow" the text, line by line. This gives them a narrow field of view and they therefore miss objects outside the main flow of the text they're reading. Unlike higher-literacy users, lower-literacy users don't scan text. As a result, for example, they can't quickly glance at a list of navigation options to select the one they want. They must read each word in each option carefully. Their only other choice is to completely skip over large amounts of information, which they often do when things become too complicated. Lower-literacy users tend to satisfice -- accept something as "good enough" -- based on very little information because digging deeper requires too much reading, which is both challenging and time consuming. As soon as text becomes too dense, lower-literacy users start skipping, usually looking for the next link. In doing so, they often overlook important information. In addition, having to scroll breaks lower-literacy users' visual concentration because they can't use scanning to find the place they left off. Finally, search creates problems for lower-literacy users for two reasons. First, they often have difficulty spelling the query terms. Second, they have difficulty processing search results, which typically show weird, out-of-context snippets of text. As a result, lower-literacy users often simply pick the first hit on the list, even if it's not the most appropriate for their needs.
Nielsen provides some interesting webpage usability metrics comparing low literacy and high literacy outcomes for success rate (whether people could perform the task), time needed to complete tasks and user satisfaction (subjective)
If we assume that this research can be generalised to primary and secondary students we can ask
How will the readability issues of online texts on mobile technologies affect the learning outcomes of students with low literacy?
How will the time needed to complete tasks by students with low literacy be affected by the introduction of mobile technologies?
I was interested to see that although adult low literacy readers took significantly longer to complete the tasks and had a significantly lower success rate – they self-rated their satisfaction at similar levels to adult high literacy users.
This research on low literacy adults learning outcomes when reading from the web align well with the outcomes recorded in Keryn Pratt’s research on primary students learning outcomes when searching online. As Pratt explains – internet searching is done a lot in schools – and students are confident even optimistic about how well they search.
One of the most common uses of information and communication technology (ICT) in schools is using the Internet for research (see Becker, 1999; Lai & Pratt, 2003; Lai, Pratt & Trewern, 2001; Smerdon et al., 2000), yet only limited information is available regarding children’s Internet searching behaviour (Kuiper, Volman & Terwel, 2005). What is clear from the research that has been done is that children are generally not very successful in doing this ( Bilal, 2000; Schacter, Chung & Dorr, 1998), and that they use only limited search strategies (Bilal, 2000; 2001; 2002; Large & Beheshti 2000; Shacter et al 1998; Wallace & Kuperman, 1997). A review by Hsieh-Yee (2001) of children and adults’ search behaviour found that:
Children could interact with the Internet; they did not search systematically; they preferred browsing; and they had difficulty typing search terms, formulating search statements and judging the quality of Web pages. However, all the children felt confident about their Web searches (e.g. Kafai & Bates, 1997; Large et al 1999; Schacter et al., 1998) (p. 172).
From Children’s Internet searching: Where do they go wrong? Keryn Pratt University of Otago CINZS Vol 21 No 1 2009
4. Children are not very good at doing internet research.
Although the usefulness of mobile technologies is often framed in terms of the ease of access to information – anywhere, anytime etc - Pratt’s research with NZ students confirms that of many others – students may appear, confident, connected and engaged but they do not get good learning outcomes when researching online.
Pratt describes how Year 4 and Year 8 students in Dunedin schools did not get good learning outcomes when using the internet to search for information (both well-defined and ill-defined searching). One of the problems seems to lie in their inability to comprehend (think critically about) the content they access.
In line with previous research, students did not perform particularly well on these searching tasks. However, examination of the results shows that it was not the mechanics of searching that seemed to be the problem. All but one student at either year level had navigated to a page containing the information for which they were looking (either a website they visited or a results page for one of their searches), which suggests they were able to identify appropriate search terms. Instead, the problem these students had was identifying the correct information within the site. This would seem to fit Lazonder’s (2000) model, which divided searching into two stages: locating the site and locating the information. However, many of the students did have trouble with locating the site, albeit not with the mechanics, but rather with the identification of it as the correct site. Children’s Internet Searching: Where do they go wrong
If we assume that this research can be generalised to other primary and secondary students we can ask
How will the learning outcomes of students be affected when they are encouraged to use mobile technologies for researching and reading content online?
It all makes me wonder why we do not look out for the ways that mobile technologies might undermine and compromise student learning outcomes before we rush to adopt them.
What is our professional responsibility in looking for strengths and weaknesses when introducing a screen reading technology that can limiting learning outcomes?
It is hard to imagine a future when home-school communication might read like this …
We are determined to take education at [insert school name here] truly into the 21st century. We want to reinvent our school to meet the needs of the 21st century and we need your help to shift a few paradigms.
Select one of the following to insert
1. We’d like your approval to introduce a technology to classrooms that research shows will slow the rate at which high literacy students will be able to read and comprehend text.
2. We need your help to fund the introduction of a technology that research shows will most likely compromise and limit learning outcomes for low literacy students at our school BUT will leave all students feeling optimistic and confident about their learning outcomes.
3. We can offer special placement options for your student to learn in a digital classroom where they can have ready access to the internet for researching content – something research shows will result in naff learning outcomes in the locating relevant information bit and the finding the important ideas bit.
We want [insert name of school her] to be bold. We want [insert name of school her] to break the mould. We want to be flexible, creative, challenging, and complex. We need mobile technologies to be all these things for your children.