Rakefet Ackerman

Who they are

Ackerman works in metacognition, the monitoring and control of one's own learning. The questions are how well people judge what they know, and how they use that judgement to decide when to stop studying. Her reading research uses the screen and the page as two settings in which those judgements get made, and it measures both what readers score and what they expect to score.

The 2011 experiments with Goldsmith are the paper most often cited from this body of work. Participants read expository texts of 1,000 to 1,200 words, on screen or on paper, and predicted their result on a later multiple-choice test. When study time was fixed, 70 participants scored the same on both media, 61.0 per cent on screen and 60.7 per cent on paper, but the screen readers predicted 71.0 per cent against 65.6. When 74 participants set their own study time, screen readers scored 63.2 per cent against 72.3 on paper, overestimated their scores by more, and regulated their study time more erratically. The paper readers' average prediction error was too small to distinguish from zero. The authors attribute the gap mainly to metacognition, not to anything the display did to comprehension.

A 2012 study with Tirza Lauterman, in Computers in Human Behavior, used undergraduates with a mild preference for paper. Under time limits the screen learners scored lower than the paper learners, and when they could control their own pace the two groups performed similarly. When study was cut short without warning, the medium made no difference. Paper learners who knew about a time limit in advance improved, and screen learners did not adjust in the same way. Paper learning was also more efficient, and self-assessments were generally more accurate. The authors concluded that self-regulated learning is weaker on screens and that technical hardware or software problems are unlikely to be the main cause.

Two later papers ask whether the gap can be closed. Lauterman and Ackerman (2014) found that repeated practice with the study-and-test routine helped only learners who preferred screens, while writing keywords after a delay, before judging their knowledge, removed the screen disadvantage even on the first text. After practice, paper-preferring learners showed the gap again. Sidi, Shpigelman, Zalmanov and Ackerman (2017) moved from long passages to brief but difficult problems. The screen-related drops in performance and in the accuracy of confidence appeared under time pressure and not under a loose time frame, and returned when the task was framed as a low-importance preliminary. The authors read the screen as a cue for shallower processing, and concluded that monitoring is shaped by contextual cues about how deeply a task is expected to be processed.

Taken together, these studies move the question from "does the screen reduce understanding" to "when does a screen change how hard readers try, and how well they know it". That is a narrower and more testable claim than the one in Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, and the evidence for it comes from controlled experiments, with the limits that brings: single texts, student participants, and effects that depend on time limits and task framing.

Key papers

Ackerman and Goldsmith (2011). "Metacognitive regulation of text learning: On screen versus on paper," Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 17(1), 18-32. Two experiments on expository texts. Equal scores under fixed study time, with higher predictions on screen; lower scores on screen under self-paced study. The paper also introduced the Metacognitive Learning Regulation Profile, a method for locating where such differences arise.

Ackerman and Lauterman (2012). "Taking reading comprehension exams on screen or on paper? A metacognitive analysis of learning texts under time pressure," Computers in Human Behavior 28(5), 1816-1828.

Lauterman and Ackerman (2014). "Overcoming screen inferiority in learning and calibration," Computers in Human Behavior 35, 455-463.

Sidi, Shpigelman, Zalmanov and Ackerman (2017). "Understanding metacognitive inferiority on screen by exposing cues for depth of processing," Learning and Instruction 51, 61-73.

Delgado, Vargas, Ackerman and Salmerón (2018). "Don't throw away your printed books," Educational Research Review 25, 23-38. The meta-analysis of 54 studies and 171,055 participants.

Key ideas

• The paper advantage in reading may be partly a calibration problem: screen readers expect to do better than they do.
• With fixed study time, the 2011 experiments found no difference in scores, so the cost depends on whether readers control their own pace.
• The screen can act as a cue for shallower processing, and the effect shows under time pressure or low-stakes framing.
• Practice and delayed keyword writing narrowed the gap in one set of experiments, with results that differed by learner preference.
• These are controlled experiments on single texts and student samples, so they describe conditions, not a general effect of screens on minds.

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