
Students learn more effectively from print textbooks than screens, study says - ALee
http://www.businessinsider.com/students-learning-education-print-textbooks-screens-study-2017-10
======
Adutude
Interesting tidbit, in the sentence in the article " To explore these patterns
further, we conducted three studies that explored college students' ability to
comprehend information on paper and from screens."

"Three studies" is linked to a single study, not three. The study is on the
site tandfonline.com (Taylor and Francis), where you have to pay to read the
study.

Also interesting is that Taylor and Francis, on their website
taylorandfrancis.com, says "Taylor & Francis Group publishes books for all
levels of academic study and professional development, across a wide range of
subjects and disciplines."

So long story short, this is a study saying that books are better, that's on a
site who's main business is publishing books. Not saying the study is
inaccurate, but I find an article, about how books are better, on a book
publishers site, somewhat suspect.

~~~
slg
I did an in depth review of the research for a Human Computer Interaction
class in college a couple years back before the Taylor and Francis study and
the research then generally agreed with the idea that reading a print book was
the best for comprehension (I tried quickly searching for the paper to pull
sources, but no luck). However that difference appeared to be mostly related
to form factor and not necessarily from the screen itself. Studies that used
tablets showed smaller gaps in performance than studies that used computers.
Studies that used e-ink e-readers showed almost no difference in
comprehension. I was not able to find a single study that compared more than 2
or 3 different devices using the same methodology. If I were to design a study
I would want to see a full range of tests including print books, e-ink
e-readers, tablets with full color screens, traditional computer monitors, and
e-ink monitors. Hopefully then you could better isolate the cause of the lower
comprehension.

My own hypothesis (I have a comp sci degree, so take this psychology
explanation with a grain of salt) is that comprehension is more dependent on
the person's approach to the technology rather than the technology itself.
Books are single purpose devices. When you have a book in your hand your brain
knows it is time to focus on reading. When you sit down at a computer, the
brain doesn't know what to expect or to focus on. It is similar to other
advice about training your brain to expect certain activities such as
reserving your bedroom only for sleeping or to have a dedicated home office if
you work remotely.

~~~
nabla9
My hypothesis is that the difference is related to how memory works by
associations and spatial cognition.

I read lots of research papers and books. I have tried to switch to e-readers
several times, but it never works. I learn the subject slower and I remember
much less of what I read from e-reader. I use computers and e-readers to skim
or check some details, but never to thoroughly study.

If I read physical book or printed article and underline it, leave coffee
stains on the paper etc. I'm working with actual physical object. When I
achieve the paper in a map, I can often recall where the book is stored
physically and even the coffee stains and notes in the paper.

I think physical book or paper works the same way as memory palace technique.
You remember stuff by working with them physically better than in abstract.
Physical library might be mirrored in our mind. Ancient augmented memory
technology we did not know we have and might lose. E-reader or computer
associates everything to the same object.

~~~
tr0ut
Personally my experiences have been the complete opposite. There are a number
of reasons paper books are always going to be second to ebooks to me. The idea
of lugging a book/s around. Hunting for a book at a shop or library when I'm
feeling the itch to read it sooner rather than later. Flipping through pages
whilst looking back up at a screen breaks my concentration. etc..

When the first gen Kindle was released I ordered it right away. It was one of
the most liberating devices I've ever owned. I managed to read a ton of books
that had been on my read-list for ages. This obviously has much more to do
with having everything you want to read immediately available and also the
discrete portability to do such.

Also when I would underline text in a book it was as if my brain shutoff.
Subconsciously i'm thinking 'Okay I saved this part in the book'. When I'd go
back my train of thought is gone and thus the highlight is out of context. So
that bit of physicality returns zero for me personally.

~~~
Terretta
This feels like you’re having a different conversation, there was no debate
about portability or convenience.

Also, highlighting is one of the worst ways to try to learn:

[http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/09/highlighting-is-a-waste-
of-...](http://ideas.time.com/2013/01/09/highlighting-is-a-waste-of-time-the-
best-and-worst-learning-techniques/)

~~~
tr0ut
I apologize for the confusion. My response was half directed towards the post
of Nabla9.

"If I read physical book or printed article and underline it, leave coffee
stains on the paper etc. I'm working with actual physical object. When I
achieve the paper in a map, I can often recall where the book is stored
physically and even the coffee stains and notes in the paper."

Thus my response on highlighting.

So what is it about paper or e-books? The debate is between paper and lcd? I
was thinking there is something more tangible that makes one more appealing
than the other. No? Which is why I stated why I lean towards one more than the
other. A practicality rather than a hidden nuance. Which I'm assuming is the
real reason?

------
ktta
I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical
textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that?

Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have
embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to
see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just
audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have
automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital
books can offer.

Once you bring in these advantages, I bet the pedagogical advantages will be
enormous. I'd like to see _that_ study, and I bet digital books will blow
everything out of the water.

There are advantages apart from learning benefits. Errata can be a thing of a
past with updatable textbooks. You can search for every single word easily and
save time. There's no wear and tear. Students can get away with having
textbooks on their phones, avoiding carrying textbooks weighing several
pounds. Another huge benefit is accessibility. From large font to audio
output, all accessibility features ever possible on a computer are possible
with the textbook with minimal effort.

The publishing industry is only limiting itself because any innovation on its
digital books will mean death of its money maker. It will mean much less
production and distribution costs which will put in question its atrocious
pricing.

~~~
tpkj
> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks.

Yes, digital textbooks can offer so much more, and yet maybe the "so much
more" is their biggest pitfall: they (and/or the device serving as their
platform) offer near limitless opportunities for distraction. While our
attention span - or our lack thereof, trained as we are by the 3 second rule
TV commercials push on us - might be able to get a major workout that leaves
us exhausted and feeling like we have accomplished something (though in
reality, hardly anything) - the digital format and form of delivery can rob us
of our ability to freely focus. Let's face it, even with a good old-fashioned
hard cover we can encounter distractions, and when we use digital, we're
opening ourselves up to overwhelming levels of "opportunities for distraction"
in which environment the human mind/body/condition is incapable of
flourishing. Ironically, the very limitations of the physical textbook may be
one of its liberating features.

~~~
ktta
I think that argument is often made because it is easy to make. Just because
one reads from a paper textbook means one is avoiding distractions? What about
phones and their incessant alerts?

One way you can avoid distractions is to limit the features of the device.
Pull internet access. The problem here is with the student more than the
device. I tend to get distracted a lot when reading a digital textbook too. It
takes effort, but also does not looking at your phone when you are reading a
textbook.

~~~
tpkj
[https://hbr.org/2017/10/in-a-distracted-world-solitude-
is-a-...](https://hbr.org/2017/10/in-a-distracted-world-solitude-is-a-
competitive-advantage)

------
kendallpark
> There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless.

There are also practical considerations.

I much prefer physical textbooks but their bulk presents an issue. It's not
fun hauling around one tome per class. I remember back in high school my
backpack weighed 30+ lbs.

Last year I bought a 12.9 iPad pro as a textbook replacement. It works great
(still miss the physical paper though). It has also greatly reduced the amount
of weight on my shoulders during my bike commute to and from school. Nowadays
I only carry my laptop and my tablet in my backpack.

Goodnotes can handle huge PDFs and enables me to write on and highlight the
text. Voice Dream Reader is a great app to help slog through boring reading
(Salli is the best voice I've found so far for scientific lit). I don't use
Kindle-like ebooks for textbooks. Similar to what u/acconrad said, I need to
be able to write on the text.

With all that in mind, my iPad pro is a designated READING device. I have
notifications aggressively disabled for pretty much every app. No Facebook
social media apps allowed. I won't/can't even log into Facebook on my web
browser (someone else manages my password).

~~~
noobhacker
Do you write math or long notes, or just a few words? I have not found any
stylus / tablet combination that allows me to write as freely as pen / paper,
no matter how much I'd like to go digital for portability.

~~~
bunderbunder
It's not too burdensome to add a notebook and pen to your kit.

When I was last in school, I also used an iPad (with GoodReader, GoodNotes &
Voice Dream, 'cuz each is better than the others at at least one thing I care
about), but I only used it for reading and annotating books & papers. I agree
that it's not a great option as a replacement for a notebook.

~~~
kendallpark
What is your use case for GoodReader? I'm curious.

------
jstewartmobile
I don't know if this really matters when it's horrible vs slightly less
horrible...

It's like you pay hundreds of dollars for a textbook on a subject that hasn't
changed in generations, and it's filled with pictures and diagrams and asides
and any other layout doodadery their software can muster, but when you get to
the exercises it's a pig's breakfast.

I remember my physics textbook in college was almost $200 ($200 twenty years
ago!), I'd grind out the answer with a fair degree of confidence, check the
key... wrong!? Then after banging my head against it for hours and giving up,
the professor would tell us the next day that the book was wrong.

Next year, we had differential equations. Smaller book, older book, more
words, fewer pictures--clear as a bell! Probably learned more physics in a
semester of differential equations than a year of physics. Good books make a
difference. Unfortunately, the physics book was the rule rather than the
exception.

~~~
novalis78
I collect textbooks as a hobby. It amazes me to no end how the textbooks have
changed in the last 120 years. It's especially fascinating to look at math and
engineering books from the "Apollo program generation". One thing that sticks
out is the huge amount of text that guides the student in building up a deep
mental picture and lots of thought-associations in all of these technical
books. Somehow after the 60s this approach that is fairly consistent going
back a 100 years suddenly is replaced with books that feature a ton of
pictures and turn into 'trick and exercise' books until they completely
explode with color and small text snippets in the 90s. I have my suspicions
that the earlier textual approach might have had its merits. Not sure if
anyone has done a comparative study on the effects of organizing text books
and their long term effectiveness

------
manmal
My guess is that this is related to spatial memory. A lot of memorizing
techniques somehow use space to anchor memories on; eg the old Greeks used to
walk down the city’s main street while rehearsing speeches, and anchoring
topics spatially onto the buildings.

A textbook is not exactly a street you are walking down, but it does have a
certain physical place for every topic, and our brain can anchor it there,
like „let me see, differential equations are in the last third.. ah there is
this other topic, I know that diff equations come right after that“.

~~~
spongeb00b
You've conveyed the exact problem I have with ebooks for any kind of technical
reference. I read novels in ebook formats and have no problem with there, but
after trying several O'Reilly and other publishers works I just found somehow
unable to take in the information I was reading. Quickly scanning through to
look something up is just impossible and built-in search functions are just
miserable.

~~~
randomstudent
This is a major problem for me when reading digital material, especially if
not on something like a PC. On the comuter I can at least Ctrl+F for the part
I'm after.

------
acconrad
The fourth reason is that some things can't be measured? That seems suspect. I
can think of two seemingly obvious inferences from this study that were not
mentioned.

1\. Digital devices offer more distractions because unlike a book, you also
get a slew of other apps (and the internet) at the touch of a button to
distract you. Even if you are iron-willed, an OS update will pop up and break
your concentration from time to time, a physical book will never present
anything other than what it has already printed for you.

2\. Books can be written on. I have a Kindle and I can't imagine reading
something like Skiena's _Algorithms_ book on it because the effort to take any
kind of useful notes far exceeds that of a physical book. You can write in the
margins, comment, highlight, all of which helps solidify your understanding.
Kindles and iPads may have those things, but they are likely limited in
fashion and not nearly as low of an effort to produce as with a book (unless
of course it's rented for the semester and you're prohibited from writing in
it).

~~~
sus_007
Most of the devices out there could be equipped with write-on feature should
the owner install required app for it. I'm a monthly subscriber to Adobe
Creative Cloud and I must say Adobe Acrobat DC is the only reader that you'll
ever require. You can do almost anything that is digitally possible using the
app. I can even write Javascript over my PDF documents.

------
pizza
The idea that scrolling may be jarring enough to hamper reading fits my
experience. When I scroll, it doesn't feel like just my browser has to repaint
the whole webpage, but it also feels like my _brain_ has to reconstitute the
structure of the page via a kind of inverse-repainting, just so that I can
reorient my attention, before I can resume it.

In other words, if I

\- have a (semantic) pointer to, say, the last word on a line

\- am maintaining just the single last word I read in my short-term
memory/register

\- scroll and then have to look for the line I was just on before I have
reoriented myself

then it feels like I have to do a kind of mechanistic attention-
interrupt/syscall that locks my conscious interpretation of the text's meaning
until I have returned to the index of the text that I was just at. I guess
that also explains why sometimes, when I am simultaneously trying to reflect
on the text _while_ scrolling, I am significantly less able to do so fluidly,
as if there were some underlying deadlock, and more often than not have to
repeatedly attempt finding the next line..

But if you hold a book in your hands, there is much less variation in the
'streamed/online/', structural form of the text. More or less, all that my
brain knows it needs to anticipate is page turning. It can figure out how to
cancel out my hand movements, background visual information, surroundings,
etc. from my conscious experience because that's what we've evolved to be able
to suppress from our attention.

Maybe, then, computer file viewing UIs that have page-flipping skeuomorphisms
are less attention interrupting, because they would avoid these interruptions
being done more than one time per page/pair of pages?

Link to the mentioned paper:
[http://www.co.twosides.info/download/To_Scroll_or_Not_to_Scr...](http://www.co.twosides.info/download/To_Scroll_or_Not_to_Scroll_Scrolling_Working_Memory_Capacity_and_Comprehending_Complex_Texts.pdf)

~~~
mhei
I feel the pagination method demonstrated here is advantageous in that regard,
eliminating vertical motion while allowing to see parts of two "pages" at the
same time:

[http://www.magicscroll.net/](http://www.magicscroll.net/)

I would love to have that on my ebook reader, may need to hack that together
some time to try. I dislike switching back and forth between two pages as is
sometimes necessary; in this regard, this even seems better to me than a
regular book.

------
synicalx
I tend to find there's uses for both physical and digital textbooks;

\- Physicals you can spread out, highlight stuff, visually search much fast
when you DON'T know exactly what you're looking for, and you can also re-sell
them when you're done.

\- Digital weighs nothing, is cheaper, you can ctrl-f if you DO know what
you're looking for, and often come with tools to bookmark/highlight etc.

Ideally if I'm dropping $100+ on a textbook I'd like to get access to both. If
I'm going to a class I'll take the digital one, if I'm sat at home doing
research/writing/reading then I'll use the physical one. Also I'm incredibly
vain when it comes to my bookshelves, I aim to have enough books for an in-
home library by the time I retire.

------
hannob
So I wanted to have a look at the studies they did. One would cost me $36
dollar to see, the other $42 for 24 hour access and $102 for 30 days access.

tl;dr you don't want me to read your research.

------
reificator
I didn't see anything about eink screens in that article except a mention that
they exist.

They claim the cost of scrolling is the issue, which is something that I've
not seen on an ereader. Page refreshes are a different animal to scrolling,
despite the (potentially) distracting flicker they are deterministic: one
press is one page. Scrolling is a more analogue interaction, scrolling by one
page requires more focus than pressing a button once.

------
adpirz
This doesn't really seem to hold much water. For one, the study was done on
college undergrads, a non-randomly selected group who have crossed a certain
bar for basic comprehension (looks like the researchers are from the U of
Maryland, a major university, so you can expect that the students on average
will have well above-average reading comprehension compared to the rest of the
world).

On top of that, as a former K12 educator, the tools matter far less than the
teacher implementing them and the fidelity of execution, very little of which
seems to be explored by this study. I don't think digital texts or computers
in classrooms are a panacea for what ails our classrooms or that digitizing
textbooks is even that exciting when it comes to EdTech -- it's just taking a
19th century tool and digitizing it. This study, however, does not effectively
demonstrate that either medium is better than the other, but the Ed world is
in desperate need of strong research in that regard, specifically in the
efficacy of EdTech in the classroom.

------
wudangmonk
Assuming the discrepancy cannot be solved by simply carrying around a notepad
to write with whenever you are reading something you want a deeper
understanding of, the digital medium offers many benefits in my opinion that
make it better overall.

I cannot stand reading on a white background for long periods of time. If I
had to deal with a white background I simply would not read as much. Being
able to change both font size and type is also useful because publishers do
not always make a sane choice for you.

Above all, I think price is the best reason. You might be able to get away
with charging $100+ dollars for a printed book but you cannot do that with
printed books, therefore book prices have to come down.

Even if there actually is a loss in comprehension when actively reading and
not just passive reading, the overall benefits of reading more whether its
because you can now buy more books due to the lower prices or because you can
change the color/text to suit your taste has to outweigh the benefits offered
by printed books.

------
speedplane
I found these bullet points from the article pretty insightful:

> \- Reading was significantly faster online than in print.

> \- Students judged their comprehension as better online than in print.

> \- Paradoxically, overall comprehension was better for print versus digital
> reading.

So with digital reading, you feel like you've learned more than print, but
you've actually learned less. This seems pretty dangerous.

~~~
Mindless2112
> This seems pretty dangerous.

It sounds pretty much like the Internet as a whole.

~~~
pls2halp
On the note of the internet as a whole displaying this, there was a study a
while ago which found "searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge
creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own
personal understanding of the information."

[http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000070](http://doi.apa.org/getdoi.cfm?doi=10.1037/xge0000070)

(I first heard about it through the You Are Not So Smart
podcast:[https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/11/25/yanss-063-how-
search...](https://youarenotsosmart.com/2015/11/25/yanss-063-how-search-
engines-make-us-feel-smarter-than-we-really-are/))

------
cloverich
> In our academic lives, we have books and articles that we regularly return
> to. The dog-eared pages of these treasured readings contain lines of text
> etched with questions or reflections. It's difficult to imagine a similar
> level of engagement with a digital text.

Is it? I read nearly exclusively on my kindle for exactly the opposite reason.
I find it much easier to keep highlights and notes, then quickly return to
them. And the note taking technology on the kindle is crude. Imagine if it was
an _actually_ good experience? If note taking were easier (typing is painful).
If the data were free (to be shared with other services). If it were easy to
connect with others taking notes on the same topics, at the same time? If
clicking on an image of a map made it interactive. There are so many
possibilities, most of them untapped. I miss reading things on paper. But if
our technology were to improve to half of its potential, I'm not sure I would.

~~~
ilaksh
Have you really tried to research that beyond the Kindle? Look at new products
from Google and Microsoft or aimed at the legal market. There are great
handwriting notes systems out there.

------
ilaksh
How big was this study? Did they test how well the students performed when
they had to search for information?

They say that the students read much faster on the screen. What if they just
slow down a bit?

The textbook industry is corrupt and will believe or promote anything to try
to hold on to profits.

Wasting all of that paper and making people lug around a bunch of heavy books
is asinine.

------
chw9e
A big plus that is still kind of yet to be realized is the increase in utility
of notes taken on a device. I like to jot notes in the margins of books and
papers while I'm reading, but I almost never go back and look at them. Every
once in a while I'll end up searching trying to find where I wrote my note,
and usually can never find it.

Recently I have started using Apple Pencil, Apple's Notes app and iBooks to
read and jot down ideas. Apple's Notes app already supports searching for
handwritten notes, and I hope that soon iBooks can support searching for
handwritten notes in PDFs. These apps combined with Spotlight really increase
the value of notes + a collection of books/papers, as it turns your device
into kind of a personal database.

------
quuquuquu
This is a halfway decent article from Business Insider.

I find myself 50/50 on this issue. When I need cutting edge info, or niche
info, I typically read it on a screen.

When I need offline info, or low power info, or simply a different aesthetic
for some reason, I love a nice book. Especially for older info.

Surprisingly, discovery of info is pretty boundless and fun at a large
University library, because books are sorted by topics. I don't need to
endlessly query Google for the most authoritative resources.

Personally I really feel we need both sources of info. Both types of print
have pros and cons.

I don't know if I "perform" better with one type of print though.

"Better" is very subjective, and when I was in college in 2010-13, all of my
tests were written paragraphs/essays. Totally subjective.

------
jansho
For me it’s the medium itself. eBooks are ok if they’re short or fiction, but
for heavy duty reading, I need a wide spread, and I need to be able to
annotate and flick through fast, either to preview or jump to another section.
Can’t do all that on a digital device.

------
downer71
I believe it. Learning how to operate a machine to control what gets displayed
is such a distraction, in and of itself. Endless diversions and digressions,
even if the devic has no internet. Procrastination just explodes
exponentially.

------
Fomite
This doesn't terribly surprise me, from my own experience. I either print
academic journal articles or subscribe to the physical issues, because I found
I never fully retained things I read on a screen, either desktop or iPad.

~~~
wernercd
Likewise...

Personally, I think that the addition of tactile, flipping around, lack of
distractions, etc... all the little bits add up to a more "immersive" learning
experience from books.

It strikes me as an offshoot of an article recently that said that simply
having a phone in the same room as a person decreases their ability to focus.

------
thadk
Why are we 10 years into Kindle's evolution and the renderer still does not
draw pages exactly the same way every time you load the same page (paginating
forward vs. paginating backward, at the same font size)? I have to expect that
this will reduce spatial-visual memory where people remember what position a
figure or text had on a page versus a better renderer (PDF, though impractical
on small screens) or a physical book and I'd like to see a study which
distinguishes this effect.

------
rmbeard
This study does suggest that we are doing web development all wrong and that
browser functionality is exacerbating this, instead of scrolling we could be
doing something like this: [http://www.creativebloq.com/html5/create-page-
flip-effect-ht...](http://www.creativebloq.com/html5/create-page-flip-effect-
html5-canvas-8112798) or using any number of similar solutions in jquery.

~~~
dictum
Hard nope.

I don't have any research on this, but ergonomic concerns that apply to
e-reader devices doesn't necessarily apply to desktop/laptop browsers.

Personally, I find scrolling short-length content much better than having to
transition screens. For longer reads, I set my ebook app to paginate. A tacky
page flip effect only adds an unwanted distraction.

------
anderskev
As others have mentioned I would assume distractions have something to do with
it. Whenever I need to learn a new language for work I always opt for a paper
copy of a book, and other than photography books those are the only physical
ones I have purchased in the last 10+ years. New frameworks obviously I go
with a screen as that material changes pretty rapidly, but just baseline
getting started with a language, physical book works best for me.

------
jamesrcole
> _There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. But there
> 's clearly something important that would be lost with print's demise_

The argument put forth in the article is fundamentally flawed. They're
assuming that "screens" has a fixed meaning, to mean what it's like now.

But we're actually at very early stages of reading content off screens, and
there's a lot of scope of that experience to change in the future. Better
displays, better ways to interact with the content, better ways to annotate
the content, better ways to deal with distractions on the device, etc etc.

Maybe in the end we'll discover print is definitively better, but we are
currently a long way from being able to make that claim.

------
BatFastard
Seems like there is a deeper discussion going on here. Not only Print Vs
Digital, but also open educational materials Vs "History of the World version
324".

I personally prefer printed materials for extended reading, but it is really
just a matter of taste. So if we see a study which says "Printed text books
are better", it should really add "For SOME PEOPLE". Give students a choice!
Give parents a choice!

I recall buying two copies of a 120 dollar book just so my son would not have
to lug its 5kg back and forth each day from school. The sheer amount of weight
students have to carry is ludicrous. Open educational materials solves so many
of these problems.

------
ionised
I'm a software developer and I still find I prefer print over screen, both
when engaging in field-specific study or just simply reading for pleasure.

Most of the free tutorials I use are found on websites though so that's how I
do most of my learning.

When it comes to tried and tested texts like Pragmatic Programmer, Effective
Java, Web Application Hacker's Handbook etc. I will always buy the hard copy
textbook and forego the use of the eBook.

I had a Kindle Paper White at one point and while I used it a fair bit when
travelling, I still preferred stocking a bookshelf with hard copies for
reading at home.

Something about the experience of flipping through pages makes the whole
process that much smoother for me.

------
newman8r
Physical vs digital copies offer different advantages, and for someone who's
serious about mastering the material, it probably makes sense to consider
having both.

For overall comprehension, my feeling is that the advantage of physical books
is related to spatial memory, and seems related to "memory palace" techniques
for memorization. I can physically recall pages of books I've read many years
ago, but I really don't get the same thing from a digital copy.

Being able to search within digital copies is a clear advantage. The
markup/review software and document management system also makes a huge
difference.

------
notadoc
Perhaps because screens have endless distractions whereas textbooks do not.

Personally, I prefer to read a paper book any day. It feels infinitely softer
on my eyes, and it's just more pleasant of an experience to me for whatever
reason.

------
Amygaz
Overall I would take that study very lightly. They basically took a cohort of
student that did not have to read anything meaningful until then. In
highschool they may have had some text and some work to do on a laptop, but
the bulk of it was paper based. They were also trained to highlight sentences
instead of taking meaningful notes.

Train the next generation to mostly use digital and that small study will
become a time capsule, which would incidentally be a better outcome that what
it is now, i.e. an attempt to generalize a conclusion based on an
oversimplistic experimental setup.

------
hmwhy
I was skeptical about the claim in the title of the article to begin with.
Point three and four in the article makes me even more uncomfrotable (for
reasons that others have explained much better), and the article leaves _a
lot_ to be desired.

A quick Google Scholar of "difference between screen and print in learning"
gave me two results that immediately stand out. The first article[1] (2013, n
= 72, 10th grade students, reading comprehension of texts between 1400-2000
words, print vs. PDF on computer screens) that the BI article seems to
corroborate. The second article[2] (2013, n = 538, university students,
textbooks that are learning material for exams, print vs. digital but device
type and format available from the abstract) suggests that there is no
statistically significant difference between print and screen.

Digging deeper, I found another one[3] article (2015, review/opinion based on
existing research), which questions format, design, country and culture
amongst other things—some of which have already been questioned in the
comments.

The first thing that I find disturbing aboutthis article is that I'm not even
trained in the field of education and I could find a lot of information in the
literature that seems to suggest that the BI article is highgly opinionated
and underpowered.

The second thing that I find disturbing is that the authors of the paper in
question themselves wrote that BI article and make sensational assertions with
such confidence that is, in my opinion, obviosuly flawed. It's already hard to
forgive a reporter sensationalising research results that are not the whole
picture, for the authors themselves to do it seems so casually and carelessly
seems to be a step up and is, unfortunately, increasingly popular.

[1]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883035512001127)
[2]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360131512002953)
[3] [https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01207678](https://hal.archives-
ouvertes.fr/hal-01207678)

------
dingo_bat
I can attest to this. I need big pages that I can lay flat on my desk and
scribble on with a pencil. Kindle or an LCD screen just doesn't cut it for
academic reading.

------
hackermailman
I like print books with a website offering errata, and some minimalist
recorded lectures on the material, like Gilbert Strang writing on a blackboard
to further give insight to the book's material.

Even with pdf-tools in emacs, navigating a PDF is still too much wasted time
compared to flipping pages plus I have to stare at a screen for hours. The
SICP texinfo copy I read being an exception where it was the only time I
preferred the digital copy to print.

------
sus_007
As a student of Science/Mathematics, I often make the most out of my E-books
by writing out the exercises/problems/principles on my notebook and repeating
the process (mostly for the Mathematics). I think the flexibility that E-books
offer regarding it's digital existence is the pillar of my bias towards
eBooks.

------
znpy
Yeah, no shit.

On one hand you have large screens that emit a huge amount of light, posing a
huge strain on eyes.

On the other hand you have tiny screens, too tiny to display anything remotely
useful, in black and white, and slow to update.

Ebooks for learning will not take off completely until we'll have larger,
faster, cheaper e-ink displays.

~~~
posterboy
... or rather until people are desperate enough to take advantage of the
interactive medium. A comparison books and thei e-equivalents without taking
advantage of the different mediua is actuallyleaving me flabbergasting for the
right word.

------
thinkMOAR
Nothing about not being able to run other apps/multitask with a book? When i
read a book, i cannot turn to page 123 to see who is online or get
notifications that i received an email.

Less distractions, more focused, more effectiveness; doesn't really require a
study in my opinion.

------
cyberpunk0
No students learn from visuals, demonstrations, examples, comparisons,
interactive content. Shoving a students head into a dry, dense volume of
endlessly tasteless and monotonous text is the problem we've always had,
screens or not

------
musashizak
Emotion and memory are connected. And emotion is connected with perception and
pleausure of senses. All this connections was knows from many centuries in the
yoga and meditation practice

------
Buldak
It's interesting that students thought their comprehension was better when
reading from screens, rather than paper, when in fact the opposite was the
case. What might explain that mistaken perception?

------
d--b
It'd be interesting to go into more details:

\- what if it's e-ink?

\- what if it's paginantes rather than scrolled?

\- what if there are multiple screens?

\- what if it's a very large screen?

Etc.

There must à factor that matters most than others

~~~
jlengrand
What if there isn't any other app (Whatsapp, Slack, Facebook, ...) running
next to it :)

------
ejanus
But do we need research or study to confirm this? We are community of lifelong
learners so we should know better.

~~~
kremlin
Yes, even if you Intuit something or know it from experience, it's valuable to
have thus level of certainty through a carefully conducted study. Convincing
someone your intuition is true is a lot harder than pointing to the research

------
ausjke
maybe the screen is secondary, on a computer it is way too easy to get
distracted especially for young learners comparing to a real paper-format
book?

our brain might adapt to searching instead of deep-thinking from now on, using
all abstracted data sets from big-data-somewhere, which also means, we will
lose control and the world will be taken over by AI instead

------
eradicatethots
Ok, suppose this is true, why? It sounds like such nonsense to me, there must
be confounders

