Don't throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension
Delgado and colleagues pooled the studies published between 2000 and 2017 that compared comprehension of the same text read on paper and on a screen, covering more than a hundred and seventy thousand participants across fifty-four studies. Paper came out ahead, by a small but consistent margin. Three things changed the size of the gap. It widened when reading was done under time pressure and narrowed when readers set their own pace, which points at how people read on screens rather than at the screen itself. It appeared for informational texts and for mixed sets, but not for narrative texts, which is the pattern you would expect if the cost falls on the effortful kind of reading. And it grew across the years of the sample rather than shrinking, which argues against the idea that it is a familiarity problem that younger readers will grow out of. The authors draw educational implications from it. This vault cites it whenever the screen-versus-paper question comes up.
Delgado and colleagues pooled the studies published between 2000 and 2017 that compared comprehension of the same text read on paper and on a screen, covering more than a hundred and seventy thousand participants across fifty-four studies. Paper came out ahead, by a small but consistent margin. Three things changed the size of the gap. It widened when reading was done under time pressure and narrowed when readers set their own pace, which points at how people read on screens rather than at the screen itself. It appeared for informational texts and for mixed sets, but not for narrative texts, which is the pattern you would expect if the cost falls on the effortful kind of reading. And it grew across the years of the sample rather than shrinking, which argues against the idea that it is a familiarity problem that younger readers will grow out of. The authors draw educational implications from it. This vault cites it whenever the screen-versus-paper question comes up.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
25, 23-38. 54 studies, 171,055 participants, g = -0.21.
Where we use it
- Both Sides of the Screen-Time Argument, Why We Look
Reliability of this reference
The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003
DOI: 10.1016/j.edurev.2018.09.003