Digital Reading Poses Learning Challenges for Students

Tension -- between digital reading's tendency to foster increased engagement, but discourage deeper comprehension -- is presenting a massive new challenge for schools, said Andrew Dillon, the dean of the school of information at the University of Texas at Austin.

"There's been this huge push from tech companies to get their stuff into classrooms, but that's purely a commercial venture," Dillon said. "There are real consequences for the types of serious reading people can do in those [digital] environments."

Researchers have documented students' struggles with comprehension when reading Internet-based texts on computers, although the literature on how reading e-books on computers is inconclusive. And while similar research on mobile devices is just emerging, there are worrisome signs.

A study in 2013 by Heather R and Jordan T Schugar, a wife-and-husband research team at Westchester University of Pennsylvania, found that a small sample of students comprehended traditional books at "a much higher level" than they comprehended the same material when read on an iPad.

A 2012 study by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a New York City-based research organization for children's digital media, found that 3- to 6-year-old children who "co-read" high-tech e-books with their parents "recalled significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story."

As a result, some observers fear that mobile devices, especially digital tablets as they are now being used in the classroom, are not supporting the kinds of extended, rich interactions with text called for in the Common Core State Standards. "People think of technology as the solution, but it's often the cause of the problem," Dillon said. "It's not the end of reading, but it is the diminution or simplification of reading."