“What we saw, and this is very much in line with other research, was that when the students read in the digital condition, they tended to read faster and do more skim reading,” Blikstad-Balas says.
While this finding was unsurprising, she says it refutes some criticisms of older screen-vs.-paper reading research. “Some have said, well, people grow up reading on paper, not screens, so of course they’ll do better [in that medium],” she says. “The children in this particular study grew up in mostly digital learning environments,” she continues. “If anybody should be better at reading on screens, these kids should. And they’re not.”
A bigger surprise came when she and her colleagues asked the students to assess their own performance. “They said they believed they were equally good in both conditions,” she says. “Observing them, we could see them struggling so much more in the screen condition, but they would say, ‘No, it’s the same.’”