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Advanced Bet

Why we remember more by reading –

especially print – than from audio or video
By: Naomi S. Baron, Professor of Linguistics Emerita, American University

During the pandemic, many college professors abandoned assignments from printed textbooks and
turned instead to digital texts or multimedia coursework.

As a professor of linguistics, I have been studying how electronic communication compares to

traditional print when it comes to learning. Is comprehension the same whether a person reads a
text onscreen or on paper? And are listening and viewing content as effective as reading the written
word when covering the same material?

The answers to both questions are often “no,” as I discuss in my book “How We Read Now,”
released in March 2021. The reasons relate to a variety of factors, including diminished
concentration, an entertainment mindset and a tendency to multitask while consuming digital
content.

Print versus digital reading

When reading texts of several hundred words or more, learning is generally more successful when
it’s on paper than onscreen. A cascade of research confirms this finding.

The benefits of print particularly shine through when experimenters move from posing simple
tasks – like identifying the main idea in a reading passage – to ones that require mental abstraction
– such as drawing inferences from a text. Print reading also improves the likelihood of recalling
details – like “What was the color of the actor’s hair?” – and remembering where in a story events
occurred – “Did the accident happen before or after the political coup?”

Studies show that both grade school students and college students assume they’ll get higher scores
on a comprehension test if they have done the reading digitally. And yet, they actually score higher
when they have read the material in print before being tested.

Educators need to be aware that the method used for standardized testing can affect results. Studies
of Norwegian tenth graders and U.S. third through eighth graders report higher scores when
standardized tests were administered using paper. In the U.S. study, the negative effects of digital
testing were strongest among students with low reading achievement scores, English language
learners and special education students.
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My own research and that of colleagues approached the question differently. Rather than having
students read and take a test, we asked how they perceived their overall learning when they used
print or digital reading materials. Both high school and college students overwhelmingly judged
reading on paper as better for concentration, learning and remembering than reading digitally.

The discrepancies between print and digital results are partly related to paper’s physical properties.
With paper, there is a literal laying on of hands, along with the visual geography of distinct pages.
People often link their memory of what they’ve read to how far into the book it was or where it
was on the page.

But equally important is mental perspective, and what reading researchers call a “shallowing
hypothesis.” According to this theory, people approach digital texts with a mindset suited to casual
social media, and devote less mental effort than when they are reading print.

Given increased use of flipped classrooms – where students listen to or view lecture content before
coming to class – along with more publicly available podcasts and online video content, many
school assignments that previously entailed reading have been replaced with listening or viewing.
These substitutions have accelerated during the pandemic and move to virtual learning.

Surveying U.S. and Norwegian university faculty in 2019, University of Stavanger Professor Anne
Mangen and I found that 32% of U.S. faculty were now replacing texts with video materials, and
15% reported doing so with audio. The numbers were somewhat lower in Norway. But in both
countries, 40% of respondents who had changed their course requirements over the past five to 10
years reported assigning less reading today.

A primary reason for the shift to audio and video is students refusing to do assigned reading. While
the problem is hardly new, a 2015 study of more than 18,000 college seniors found only 21%
usually completed all their assigned course reading.

Audio and video can feel more engaging than text, and so faculty increasingly resort to these
technologies – say, assigning a TED talk instead of an article by the same person.

Maximizing mental focus

Psychologists have demonstrated that when adults read news stories or transcripts of fiction, they
remember more of the content than if they listen to identical pieces.

Researchers found similar results with university students reading an article versus listening to a
podcast of the text. A related study confirms that students do more mind-wandering when listening
to audio than when reading.

Results with younger students are similar, but with a twist. A study in Cyprus concluded that the
relationship between listening and reading skills flips as children become more fluent readers.
While second graders had better comprehension with listening, eighth graders showed better
comprehension when reading.
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Research on learning from video versus text echoes what we see with audio. For example,
researchers in Spain found that fourth through sixth graders who read texts showed far more mental
integration of the material than those watching videos. The authors suspect that students “read”
the videos more superficially because they associate video with entertainment, not learning.

The collective research shows that digital media have common features and user practices that can
constrain learning. These include diminished concentration, an entertainment mindset, a
propensity to multitask, lack of a fixed physical reference point, reduced use of annotation and less
frequent reviewing of what has been read, heard or viewed.

Digital texts, audio and video all have educational roles, especially when providing resources not
available in print. However, for maximizing learning where mental focus and reflection are called
for, educators – and parents – shouldn’t assume all media are the same, even when they contain
identical words.

Questions

1. How does the author support the main idea? (10 points)
a. by giving examples from her classroom
b. by citing her book, “How We Read Now”
c. by summarizing research and studies
d. by comparing reading and learning videos

2. It is easier to answer more complicated reading questions when you read on screen. (10
points)
Choose:
TRUE / FALSE
Justify your answer by quoting from the text. (Both quote & answer must be correct).

3. Choose the correct answer: (8 points).

The studies about reading materials before comprehension tests CONFIRM / REFUTE
the students’ assumptions.
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4. How was the author’s research different from the previous studies? (8points)

5. List TWO factors responsible for the differences between reading on paper vs. reading
on screen. (8 points 4*2).
a. ______________________________________________________
b. _______________________________________________________

6. What is the definition of the “flipped classroom”? (8 points)

7. “These substitutions have accelerated…” (par 11) (8 points)

What substitutions does the writer refer to?

8. Choose the correct answer:

The findings of the studies DEPEND / DO NOT DEPEND on the age of the participants.
(10 points)
Justify your answer by quoting from the
text:____________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________

____/70
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Read the cloze.

Choose the verb in the correct tense.

5 points each (30 points) overall.

https://writingcenter.unc.edu/2021/03/kicking-social-media-addiction/ consulted on
13.11.2022.

Kicking Social Media Addiction

By Ashton, a UNC Sophomore

Somewhere in this year of quarantine, I ______ (go/ am going to/ went) from just casually using
social media to being a full-on addict. Between Snapchat, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram, my
attention span_______ (was/was going to/were) extremely short as notifications, dings, and
buzzes pulled me away from class, homework, and even sleep. After a few months, I_____
(become/became/am becoming) a master at logging onto Zoom calls with half my attention and
getting by with only half a night’s rest.

Worst of all, I had also become quite good at ignoring or shrugging off the realities of my social
media addiction. In my mind, Snapchat and Twitter were a replacement for the downtime I
_________(use to/ would use/used to) have with my friends before quarantine. Also, Youtube
and Instagram were just a harmless way of passing time.

Honestly, how much_______ (can/should/must) just a few videos and posts a day add up?

Well, according to the Apple Screen Time feature, quite a bit. Like so much that “a few hours”
was a hilariously tragic understatement of my daily social media habits. What I could have sworn
was maybe an hour of Snapping stacked up to nearly four hours a day and my Youtube and
Twitter stats___________ (was not/were not/was not going to be) far behind.
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____/30