Dr Michelle Dickinson: nanotechnologist on the new research showing kids learn better from books over screens

If you are teaching your children to read, use printed books not screens.

New research published in the journal Review of Educational Research analysed 25 studies involving over 470,000 students looking at reading comprehension.

Reading comprehension is defined as the ability of a student to read text and understand the meaning of it later – a crucial skill for solving problems and making decisions in life.

They found that the reading comprehension skills of children who read printed text were six times better when compared to children who read the same content on a digital screen.

The researchers estimated that if a student spent 10 hours of their leisure time reading printed books, their ability to comprehend would be 6-8 times higher than if they had spent that same amount of time reading on digital devices.

There were two reasons suggested for the difference in comprehension:

Firstly, when children read online, they are mostly consuming internet content, which tends to be lower quality content comprising of less sophisticated vocabulary and shorter sentences than physical books.

Secondly, when children read online they are more likely to be distracted by other online content resulting in them focussing less on the material that they were reading.

While all students studied showed that print reading was better than online reading, the study found there was less of a difference in comprehension for older students who were at high school and university compared to a huge difference for primary school aged children who are just learning to read.

The research is important, as many schools now teach students using e-readers, tablets and computers - perhaps assuming that they were the same, however the authors of the study encourage parents and teachers to encourage print reading over digital as much as possible. 

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