The good, the bad and the ugly!
Since the dawn of the internet and thus our option to read on-screen, people have expressed concern about its negative impact on our children. Have we raised a generation who prefer a screen to paper? Is that even a problem? And is reading on screen any different from reading a traditional book? Should we even consider get rid of old style textbooks?
I have been exploring some thoughts in this area that offer both a warning and positivity, as well as some useful strategies to develop for future screen reading.
According to Delgado et al. (2016), in older children the levels of comprehension of the fiction texts between that read on screen and that read on paper, is little different, however comprehension levels of non-fiction or factual texts can start to differ considerably. Information read from a screen is significantly less well comprehended. This is particularly useful to know as our children enter the senior years at Barrow Hills and onwards into their senior schools. For older children, where the emphasis on screen reading information increases, so does the level of non-fiction information needed to be absorbed, and across a wider range of subjects. The Delgado research suggests a level of wariness is needed about reading all text from a screen. A common problem with reading non-fiction on screen is the problem of just blindly copying what is written or following random embedded links, without truly comprehending the content.
When your children are given a research project, the teachers at Barrow Hills will have given them some specific parameters and websites, it is important that they stay within these parameters to ensure that they really understand rather than being tempted to just blindly copy chunks from wikipedia. It is at this point that mixing in traditional texts is really useful and supportive. There is a wide range of books, on a huge variety of topics, available in our school library, so it is always worth encouraging your child to come and take our supporting texts for any topics they are studying.
In the younger years, the interaction with traditional books is seen as significantly more important across all genres and children who gain most of their reading experiences from a screen are at a disadvantage. Obviously in the modern world it is important for children from a young age to gain experience of working on a screen but in terms of early language and empathy development, research suggests that the physical interaction with books and their illustrations, as well as the person who reads with them is equally, if not more important.
On a similar topic, I have often suggested the use of audible materials to go alongside traditional reading, and indeed for children who struggle with reading this is still a really strong tool. However, researchers Daniel & Woody (2010) carried out an interesting investigation with older children who were given a choice between listening to a podcast/watching a YouTube article or reading a traditional text. The overwhelming preference at the outset was to be in the tech group, but following the activity, those children who were allocated the traditional book demonstrated far superior comprehension and even themselves largely conceded the benefits of traditional reading. I would still personally advocate a combination, especially if your child is not a passionate reader or struggles with vocabulary but this research indicates that listening and following text in combination could be the optimum combination.
It is worth considering the following approaches when supporting your children to read from a screen. Try and show them how to scroll slowly, skimming the information as they go and then re-reading key information. Also, whilst there are many benefits of following related hyper-links from web-based texts for reading around a subject, this may need to be limited so as not to overload them and monitored by an adult to ensure inappropriate or unnecessary texts are not followed. Finally, but very importantly, children do need to develop strong habits related to screen reading because to a large extent this is the future, but much as they do in class when doing traditional reading comprehension task from books, they need to learn to make frequent scrolling stops, re-read key information, take notes, draw diagrams and mind-maps, summarise with bullet points and other creative methods to aid comprehension.
Mrs Emmett, Librarian
