Young People Reading “A Lot”? Not Really
A reality check from the blog of University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham:
“A new survey of American reading habits was published earlier this week. Much of the news coverage led with the somewhat surprising finding that young people (age 16-29), supposedly enamored of gaming and video content, reported that they read and use libraries. In fact, that they do so more than older people.
Sexy stuff, but I think it’s misleading.
One message is that young people are reading ‘a lot.’ What constitutes ‘a lot’ is a judgement call, obviously, but in this study the data showed that 83% of 18-29 year-olds had a read a book sometime in the previous year. That strikes me as a low bar to be considered ‘a reader.’
Other data show that Americans spend much more time watching television each day than they do reading.
The second way in which the coverage of the Pew study was deceptive lay in the reported age difference. Yes, young people were more likely than older people to report having read a book in the past year, but that difference was very likely due to the fact that many of them were students, doing required reading.
By the sometime-in-the-last year measure, older and younger Americans are about the same, except insofar as they are required to read for work or school.
Likewise, the increased use of libraries by young respondents is likely mediated by their need to use libraries for schoolwork.
There have been many reports of American reading habits in the last fifty years, and especially in the last twenty. The overall picture is that reading dropped when television became widely available, and hasn’t changed much since then.” (Read more here.)
This is troubling, because reading serious books, magazines and newspapers is far and away the best way to acquire the rich base of content knowledge that is necessary for deep thinking and analysis.
i am old (SEVERAL years past forty!)… but i remember a lot more of what i read in hard copy than i do of what i read in electronic formats. and when i really need ot “get” what i read, i print it out. this seems relevant bc young readers surely read a greater percentage of their text in electronic form. has anyone that you know of studied this (memory or comprehension rates from different text delivery formats)?
Yes—Anne Mangen, a professor at the University of Stavanger in Norway, has begun to look at this. In a paper titled “Hypertext fiction reading: haptics and immersion,” she writes:
“In a comparative study of reading paper and electronic books, Morineau et al. note: ‘Interaction with the physical support of the e-book during encoding is very different than with a classical paper book, but we know of no experimental work on this matter’ (Morineau, Blanche, Tobin & Gueguen, 2005, p. 336).
Starting out from the fact that there is a crucial link between the sensory–motor experience of the materiality of the support and the cognitive processing of the text content, the study conducted by Morineau et al. finds that the e-book does not provide the external indicators to memory in the way that a print book does. In the e-book, the connection between the text content and the material support is split up, allowing the technological device to display a multitude of content that can be altered with a click. The book, by contrast, is a physically and functionally unitary object where the content cannot be distinguished from the material part.
Hence, they conclude that the e-book ‘does not serve as an unambiguous index to indicate a field of knowledge on the basis of its particular physical form.’”
A more accessible, journalistic look at this issue was written by Alex Beam of the Boston Globe in an article titled “I screen, you screen, we all screen.” Beam writes:
“A Norwegian researcher, Anne Mangen, recently weighed in with an interesting paper in The Journal of Research in Reading, asserting that screen reading and page reading are radically different. The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens, or scrolling with keys or on touch pads take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book, or the mobile phone, Mangen writes.
Her conclusion: ‘Materiality matters.’ One main effect of the intangibility of the digital text is that of making us read in a shallower, less focused way.”
Doug, I too find that I remember what I read on paper better than what I read on the screen. Whether this is true for younger people who grew up reading principally on screens, research has yet to determine.
I think this distinction between print reading and ‘digital text’ is important to make. I instinctively avoid reading books on my tablet or computer because the lit screen itself seems to distract from a focus on the text and an immersion in that text.
I do have one nuance to add, however. I believe that e-Readers that are not backlit can provide the same immersion in the text that a print book can. I use an old Nook e-Reader, and I find that I am just as engaged in reading long and complex books on it as I am with print. The difference between this and tablets is that there aren’t those additional distractions in the form of notifications, nor the everpresent backlighting.
The paradox is that in Norway the authorities are extremely technology-friendly, and Norwegian schools are filled with technology. The Norwegian government has even invested in a website whith the intention of replacing textbooks (http://ndla.no/en?fag=). Mangen is also into handwriting research,and she claims that writing by hand is different from typing. Yet, all exams in upper secondary schools in Norway are now typed, and the teaching of handwriting is sporadic and non-existing in many schools. Ironically, touch typing is not taught either. This sounds too sad to be true, but unfortunately it is.
The type of digital device, resolution, type of illumination, size of screen used during the research, can differ the results. For instance, a
Desktopcl, an iPad and a brand-new Kindle Paperwhite may have extremely different results.
some more thoughts on why i don’t read as well electronically. Habits are hard to break. i read a book with a pencil in my hand (can’t with a tablet)… i am sure i read slower on paper and am less inclined to “skip around” with my eyes. i am more inclined to flip back to something i previously read w a book. finally i am more alert to page positioning. that is, i often remember where on the page an important quote or idea was. but an e reader nothing is fixed… it scrolls across the screen. it has no place.
I think one reason a dedicated e-reader (vs a tablet) gives you a more immersive experience similar to a book is that in addition to the lack of backlighting, you have no quick exit out to the web or other distractions to take you out of the book experience. I love my basic kindle for that. Mind you there are good books and bad. But not being able to get away from the bad ones quite so quickly helps me experience bad literature as well. It takes me a little longer to turn off the kindle that jumping out to the web at the first whiff of lousy writing.