E-Readers Fail at Education

Cash-strapped students across the U.S. have watched the rise of the e-readers with anticipation. It's understandable; these devices could ostensibly replace the expensive textbooks that many students shell out for every semester. Eventually. For now, e-readers are still supplemental devices because many of them don't work well and, more importantly, they don't work well with the human brain.

A recent University of Washington study interviewed 39 first-year graduate students in the university's Department of Computer Science & Engineering, which participated in a pilot study of Amazon's Kindle DX (a large-screen e-reader). By seven months into the study, fewer than 40% of the students did their schoolwork on the Kindle. The problem: the Kindle has poor note-taking support, doesn't allow or easy skimming, and makes it difficult for students to look up references (in comparison with computers or textbooks). As a result, some of the students interviewed amazingly kept sheets of paper with their Kindle case to take notes, and other read near computers so that they could easily look up references.

There's another, larger problem, according to the U of W: The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues such as the location on the page and the position in the book to go back and find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.