by Rose O’Malley
With this semester already winding down, and thoughts naturally turning to designing next spring’s courses, many professors will be faced with a dilemma: should electronic texts be allowed in the classroom or is it better to stick with paper?
For those teaching texts not yet available in electronic formats, this will be an easily-answered question. Many professors, however, will find themselves wondering about the impact of allowing their increasingly-wired students to use electronic versions of course texts. Insisting on paper may seem old-fashioned, while going entirely digital runs the risk of leaving students behind.
Thankfully, there has been a lot of research and discussion about the benefits and drawbacks of each text format, and it is possible for every professor to choose the medium that is right for her class and her students. There are four major topics to consider in this debate:
The first step in ensuring that students are able to learn something from their course texts is making sure that they are able to obtain those texts in the first place. There are two major aspects to text access: cost and ease.
If a text is “too expensive,” the student is less likely to purchase it and therefore less likely to be prepared for class. Electronic texts may seem like they have a higher financial barrier to entry because they require an electronic device to access. Even though their prices are dropping, Kindles, laptops, and tablets are still fairly expensive pieces of technology, especially when compared to printed books. What professors should realize, however, is that this is an up-front cost that the majority of students have already decided to pay: 52 percent of college students own tablets, and 88 percent own laptops. Even those students who don’t have one of these devices have access to CSI’s many computers in the library or labs. And for those who prefer to read on the go, mobile devices (which 85 percent of college students own) provide continuous access to electronic texts in the palms of the students’ hands.
Given that most of our students have the necessary devices, therefore, financial ease of access shifts in favor of electronic texts. E-books can be around the same cost or less expensive than their print counterparts. Works in the public domain (like, for example Pride and Prejudice) are easily accessible at no cost to the student through online services like Amazon or Project Gutenberg. Public and university libraries are also beginning to provide a large amount of their catalog as downloadable e-books, which, like typical library loans, are completely free. Many professors can also choose to provide appropriate course readings on Blackboard, to which, of course, all students have free access.
The financial cost of text should be considered alongside the difficulty of accessing it. If the text is difficult to obtain in a timely manner, perhaps because you require a specific, harder to find edition, or because it is backordered, it follows that the student is less likely to have it in time for class.
It is important to recognize that, like cost, your version of “difficult” may be different than your students’. Even though it would be advisable for all students to purchase all class texts at the beginning of the semester, not all students do this. Some of this is because of cost – they are trying to space out their spending, and so only buy the books they need right away, intending to purchase the rest later, but still before they are needed – and some is due to uncertainty. Students may want to spend some time in class first to determine if they will continue with the course or drop it for something else. Your more cynical students will also want to see if the professor requires them to regularly demonstrate that they have done the reading. If you do not, they may not see the point in spending money and effort obtaining texts that they will not need to prove they have read. (Many of you may be nodding your heads, but for the skeptical, I would suggest remembering that a major category on Rate My Professor is “Textbook use.” Students can choose “Essential to passing,” “It’s a must have,” “You need it sometimes,” “Barely cracked it open,” or “What textbook?” Presumably this is to warn students that in some classes they will really need to obtain the texts.)
With all of this in mind, it is obvious that electronic texts offer greater immediacy of access than paper texts. Students can purchase e-books or access online versions of texts on Blackboard or other internet sources with no wait for shipping or library returns. In a perfect world, immediate access would not be necessary, but in the actual world, students having the option to instantly open a text even hours before class increases their likelihood of completing the reading.
Verdict: With campus-wide online tools like Blackboard allowing for easy posting of open source readings, and more and more students having tablets, e-readers, and laptops, electronic texts edge out traditional texts in terms of access.
2. Reader Experience
Whether or not a student enjoys the class reading may seem like it hinges entirely on his or her interest level in the material – if the subject is exciting to the student, she will engage with the text more actively than if it is too difficult or dull. The manner in which the text is presented, however, influences the student’s enjoyment of the reading experience more than you might think.
Start by considering this: Studies have shown that students who read a text electronically are more likely to experience eye-strain and headaches than those who read the same text on paper. This may seem like a small matter, but if your assigned electronic text is lengthy, you may have students giving up in the middle because the physical act of reading is uncomfortable and even painful. (It would be nice to be able to assume that students leave enough time before class to read even the longest texts with frequent enough breaks to avoid this problem, but we know that this would be overly optimistic. Students who procrastinate may be more likely to finish a print text than they are to finish the same text in an electronic format.)
Then, of course, there is the issue of student distraction while reading; we are all aware that a student who reads on a laptop has the option of clicking quickly from the assignment to Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, and that many students indulge in those options. For example, a recent study shows that students on electronic devices who were given a 15-minute study break switched tasks an average of three times during that period – and one can assume that the rate would have been higher in a less formal study environment. This behavior leads to students’ reading the required text in small, distracted bursts over a longer period of time, rather than giving the assignment their full concentration
What may be surprising to professors, however, is that even those students who frequently attempt to “multitask” their way through a reading assignment find the distractions of their devices frustrating, rather than purely enjoyable. They are aware that it takes longer to complete an assignment when they move between screens or allow themselves to be distracted by texts and Twitter. One student interviewed for an article in the Washington Post about reading preferences noted that, “You just get so distracted…It’s like if I finish a paragraph, I’ll go on Tumblr, and then three hours later you’re still not done with reading.”
This self-awareness means that more students prefer paper reading over electronic. A survey of college students in Germany, Japan and the US by Naomi Baron found that, “if cost were the same, about 90 percent (at least in my sample) prefer hard copy for schoolwork. If a text is long, 92 percent would choose hard copy. For shorter texts, it’s a toss-up.” The same study revealed that, “Among American and Japanese subjects, 92 percent reported it was easiest to concentrate when reading in hard copy. (The figure for Germany was 98 percent.) In this country, 26 percent indicated they were likely to multitask while reading in print, compared with 85 percent when reading on-screen.”
As these numbers show, requiring that a given text be obtained only in print format will not, of course, remove all of these potential distractions – cell phones are almost always within arm’s reach, after all. But making it just a little bit easier for students to unplug while completing their assignments may end up helping them fully engage in the material and even enjoy themselves as they do so.
Verdict: As counter-intuitive as it may seem, even the most wired students prefer the experience of reading paper texts over electronic texts.
3. Reading Comprehension
Since the invention of e-readers and tablets, along with the rising number of texts available in electronic formats, many studies have attempted to assess whether actual reading comprehension changes with reading formats. Not all of these studies agree with one another (likely due to factors like inconsistencies in methodology and rapid changes in both technology and the comfort with which students approach new technology), but some useful patterns can still be gleaned by examining their conclusions.
The first thing to note is that students read differently (if not necessarily better or worse) depending on the format of the text. Reading on a screen rather than a page encourages skimming for key words or scanning for general ideas rather than deep, attentive reading. Students are also more likely to read an electronic text only once and will spend less time in deep reading than those who read a paper text. Even the small act of scrolling through an electronic text – as one does through the open-source texts at Project Gutenberg for example –has an impact on reading. That small gesture results in paying less attention to the content of the text because of the attention needed to continuously “relocate” without the physical markers of page turning.
These different practices lead to different performances on tests of recall and comprehension. A 2014 study found that readers were significantly better at remembering the order of events of a mystery when they read the text on paper than when they read it on a Kindle. The lead researcher on the study, Anne Mangen of Stavanger University in Norway, attributes this difference to the lack of physicality in the e-reading experience, saying, “the haptic and tactile feedback of a Kindle does not provide the same support for mental reconstruction of a story as a print pocket book does.” In other words, students will remember details from a story in part by remembering the physical page of the book. Without actual pages, a text on a Kindle can blend together, making it more difficult for students to access their memories of plot details.
Similar conclusions have been drawn from other studies and recent cognition research. Rakafet Ackerman, for example, found that students absorbed more on paper, but, interestingly, felt that they absorbed more when reading on a screen. Cognitive scientist Jenny Thomson believes that physical pages serve as “anchors for deep comprehension” and are necessary for a full, structural understanding of a text.
It is important to note, however, that other recent studies led to different conclusions. A study that focused on dyslexic students encountering shorter pieces of text found digital versions to be superior to paper. Others have found no differences in reading comprehension across the board, concluding that individual preferences rather than text format determine a reader’s ability to absorb and comprehend. These are important studies to keep in mind, especially as reader preferences may shift toward e-texts in the future. For those considering a large classroom population, however, rather than each individual student, they may be less relevant to course design – remember, as mentioned above, most students still prefer paper texts.
Verdict: Even though the research is new and somewhat divided, most studies suggest that students do better on most metrics of reading comprehension with paper, rather than electronic texts.
One of the major strengths of electronic texts is that they offer the reader the opportunity to interact more fully with the material. Traditional paper may allow for highlighting and note-taking (both very important practices that are increasingly offered on e-readers), but that seems simplistic compared with e-textbooks that offer practice problems and demonstrations as a part of the “text.” In fact, even though, according to the aforementioned Washington Post article, most students prefer reading paper texts over electronic texts, the only exception to this rule is with those math and science e-textbooks that offer “access to online portals that help walk them through study problems and monitor their learning.”
E-textbooks are not the only books that offer increased interactivity, however. For example, there are free online versions of Shakespeare plays that offer word definitions and historical context via hyperlinks. This may not seem terribly different than the endnotes and footnotes that are in every good edition of Shakespeare’s plays, but students may be more likely to click than to flip. Even outside of these pre-linked texts, students who read on a connected device have closer access to sources like dictionaries or Google. Rather than turning to another source to access information, they can simply open a browser tab. This practice has its downsides, of course, as any professor who has encountered students’ parroting back the pre-packaged Wikipedia definition of a term or event can tell you. Still, the ability to quickly and easily access information will make the student more likely to possess that information before class.
Verdict: This one is simple: electronic texts offer the reader an interactive experience that paper texts do not.
The Bottom Line: Should you allow students to use electronic texts or stick to traditional paper? The answer is not simple. Instead of making one hard and fast rule, consider how each text will be used in your class, and what you hope your students will get out of it.
If you have a short piece that, for example, gives some key definitions or a brief historical overview that you will be discussing in greater depth in class, putting it up on Blackboard or providing a link to an online version may be ideal. You can feel certain that all of your students will have immediate access to the reading, it is not so long as to require a great deal of concentration or time, and you will provide much of the deeper comprehension framework during class time.
If, however, you are assigning a longer piece that will be dealt with over several classes, or even several weeks, and you expect students to do their own processing of the material before they attend the next class, you may want to stick to print, especially if future writing assignments will be centered around this text. Students will be better prepared to delve deeper into a text that they have encountered on paper.
These are only two examples, of course, but in any case, you will need to balance your priorities and consider what is the most important part of the reading experience for each text in your individual class.
Looking Ahead: Technology is changing constantly, and e-texts are no exception. As e-readers develop and perhaps address their current shortcomings, this debate may need to be revisited. Perhaps the ability to customize the appearance of each text to the student’s individual preferences will eventually override the ability to take physical notes. Perhaps the recent dip in e-book sales is the harbinger of a resurgence in paper texts. In any case, this is a debate that we will all be participating in for years to come.