Reading print improves comprehension far more than looking at digital text, say researchers
A study from the University of Valencia found that print reading could boost skills by six to eight times more than digital reading
A slightly misleading title. It's not reading something on a printed medium compared reading that same thing on a digital medium. It's that the shit written on the internet has no educational value..
I think it's more than slightly misleading.
I feel like it's almost propaganda at this point to disparage electronic media for reading and writing. Whether it's reading, writing, or notetaking, there are a lot of commonly cited studies that say real paper is always best.
I don't think the studies are very good...
I remember reading a study on sleep quality, purportedly testing whether people sleep better after reading a print book compared to a digital book. If I remember correctly, this is also one of the studies cited for the “blue light bad” trend.
The study found that reading digital books vs print harmed sleep. Their test conditions were something like this (note: I’m not exaggerating how ridiculous the setup was):
Print book: sit/lay in bed however you wish in a moderately lit room and read for some number of hours before you sleep.
Digital book: in the same room with the same lighting, an iPad is attached to a a device that holds it a prescribed distance from your face. The device cannot be moved, so you must sit in a particular position for the entire reading time. THE IPADS BRIGHTNESS SET TO MAXIMUM. You cannot adjust the brightness.
Yeah, I’m probably going to sleep worse after being forced to sit in the same position for multiple hours while being blinded.
Salmerón added that one surprising finding was that the relatively small association between digital reading for leisure and comprehension stands regardless of the type of reading people engage in, across both social media and educational websites such as Wikipedia. “We expected that the latter would be much more positively associated with text comprehension, but our data says that is not the case.”
In college i pirated all my books so I was left reading them on my phone and monitor. If I really couldn’t grasp something I’d print it out. Definitely helped for like stepping through memory and addressing junk where I would doodle.
