Despite
the proliferation of electronic devices in classrooms today, the vast majority
of college students (93%) and seventh- through 12th-graders (87%) still see
paper as an essential component for reaching their educational goals. While
these numbers come from an understandably print-biased source—the Paper and
Packaging Board’s Paper and Productive Learning: The Third Annual Back-to-School Report—they jibe with many other recent studies.
In
the report, almost 95% of parents said they see their children do well on homework
completed on paper, while more than 72% noted having seen their child have
difficulty staying focused when working on homework on a tablet or computer. More
than 88% said their child remembered assignments better when he or she wrote
them down on paper.
The
youngest students surveyed, seventh- and eighth-graders, agreed that they learn
information best when they write it down by hand. Slightly more than half of
college-age students still gave the same answer, and 81% said they always or
often use paper tools to prepare for tests.
A
Princeton University researcher told NPR that people who type onto a device
during a lecture attempt to take their notes verbatim, while those who write
their notes longhand are “forced to be more selective—because you can’t write
as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material they were
doing benefited them” in their learning.
Surprisingly,
there isn’t as much research as one would expect exploring the benefits of and
differences between reading on a screen and on a page. A recent paper published
in SAGE Journals’ Review of Educational
Research found that of 878 relevant studies published from 1992-2017, just
36 directly compared digital vs. print
reading and reliably measured learning by the two methods.
