Is Comprehension Better with Digital Text?

Tim Shanahan

This blog first posted on October 7, 2018, and reposted on November 9, 2024. The reason for the repost is because of the great amount of relevant research that has been published since it first appeared.

Over these six years, there have been seven additional meta-analyses, all but one concluding that we comprehend screens less well than paper (Clinton, 2019 – 29 studies; Delgado, et al., 2018 – 54 studies; Díaz, et al., 2024 – 49 studies; Furenes, et al., 2021 – 39 studies; Kong, et al. 2018 – 17 studies; Öztop, & Nayci, 2021 – 12 studies). The one exception found no difference between media with narrative texts, possibly because most readers find these to be relatively easy (Schwabe, Lind, Kosch, & Boomgaarden, 2022). Nevertheless, given the great agreement among meta-analyses, there are individual studies that contradict these conclusions (e.g., Florit, De Carli, Lavelli, & Mason, 2022), the meta-analytic differences are not especially large, and some of these analyses have concluded that students can easily surmount the digital disadvantages they had identified.

Newer studies confirm my introspection – the processing of texts on screens is faster and shallower (e.g., Jensen, Roe, & Blikstad-Balas, 2024). Simply put, we tend to skim more when reading screens and we are less likely to stop and think about what we are reading which limits later memory for the information.

A particularly troubling correlational study reported that the more that students read digital text at school, the lower their resulting reading comprehension. Readers not only comprehend screens more poorly than paper but according to this study, digital reading diminishes comprehension ability (Salmerón, Vargas, Delgado, & Baron, 2023). But, again, there is discrepant information on this point, too, making it uncertain whether digital reading experiences are detrimental in the long run (Hare, Johnson, Vlahiotis, Panda, Tekok?Kilic, & Curtin, 2024).  

I’m sticking to my contention that researchers and teachers should be trying to figure out how to prepare kids to read digitally more scrupulously. I am not disputing the new research – I think it’s certain that people read digitally less well, and I’m also concerned that this might hinder how well kids can read in the long run. However, most of my professional reading is now on screens rather than paper, all my newspaper reading is digital, and even much of my entertainment reading takes place on my I-Pad. Whether we read light beams as well as ink is not the determining factor. Digital reading is on us like white on rice, and we’d better prepare students for success in this electron-driven literacy universe.

Teacher question:

Do we read digitally as well as we read paper texts? 

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