Laura Broderick
Glenbard East High School
Lombard, Illinois
Dorothy Mikuska ePen&Inc.
Oak Brook, Illinois
Marti Seaton
Retired Glenbard South High School
Glen Ellyn, Illinois
© 2015

Since we do not share our copyrighted
PowerPoint file nor our script, we are providing notes from our presentation should you have missed important information to take back to your colleagues.
We appreciate your asking for our presentation information and hope it helps you enhance your students’learning from paper and screen.

• Teach students to love reading by stimulating a sense of inquiry within and beyond the curriculum
• Build collections—electronic and paper

Department of Education goal: all students will have all textbooks, curriculum, and library material delivered electronically by 2016.

• Need to know how students and adults read electronically
• Make paper/electronic reading decisions with
deliberation and reflection
• Realize the bearing these kinds of sources have on academic achievement of students and assistance students may require to enhance the reading and learning process

• Stumble upon works, reminding us of things we’ve read before or have meant to read
• A tangible sense of ownership
• A sensory experience
• Generating emotional engagement

• Personal space for recording responses to what we read
• Slows us down to understand and reflect
• “we gloriously forget ourselves…” Elizabeth
Barrett Browning
See: Baron,Naomi. Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a
Digital World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Print.

Advantages of Screen Reading
• Access dictionary definition
• Links to other sources
• Change size and color of text
• Save picture and text to manipulate information
• Convenient - mobile
• Search features
• Read widely and quickly

But Screen Reading Discourages
• Reading longer texts
• Rereading
• Deep reading
• Remembering what you have read (often aided by handwritten annotation)
• Individual, not just social, encounters with books

Is Screen Reading the Same as
Paper Reading?
• Brain reads same words differently on paper than on screen
• Cannot assume reading skills for good paper reading automatically translate to good screen reading

How the Eyes Read from Paper and Screen:
E and F Formats
• E format on paper: read each line sequentially from beginning to end, from top to bottom
• F format on screen: read first line, skip down, read into some lines, and scroll to bottom or click elsewhere
See images of Jakob Nielsen’s eyetracking studies using heatmaps

• 16% of readers read sequentially
• 84% read words and phrases out of sequence
• Read only 18% of text

• Different neural pathways and different layers of the brain
• Electronic over-activates gray cells for immediacy and shallow understanding
• Paper activates white cells for long-term memory, emotion, deep thinking

Brain Plasticity or “Open Architecture”
• Adapts to writing systems, reading / learning process, content, and medium (scroll, book, webpage, eBook)
• Simultaneously reads and writes--receives and expresses information
• Reading has reorganized the visual, conceptual, and language areas within brain
• Expands the way humans think

• Paper reading integrates decoding skills into analogical thought, inferential reasoning, perspective-taking, critical analysis, imagination, insight, novel thought…
• Paper reading structures cognitive map of text
• Screen reading promotes the reading of words mechanically, but without interpretation.
See: Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading Brain. New York: Harper, 2007. Print.

Effects of First Five Hours of eReading
• Neural structure of brain changes
PERMANENTLY
• Online reading rewires synapses, more activity on surface than deeper parts of brain
See: Small, Gary and Gigi Vorgan. iBrain: Surviving the
Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind. New York: Collins,
2008. Print.

• More online reading = more skimming and scanning
• Risk weakening deep reading part of brain
• Like any muscle, “use it or lose it”; enlarges specific parts of brain
• Quick sweeps through text = information retrieval, not knowledge formation

• Fluency is NOT speed reading
• Fluency is not accurate decoding
• Fluency is efficiency—efficient use of brain’s neurological connections
• Fluency requires time to think, to connect to your past, present, future time
• Fast reading is only decoding

• The moment when “that which is the end of their (the authors’) wisdom is the beginning of ours”
• “…the heart of the reading process: going beyond the text.”
See: Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and
Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper, 2007. Print.

• Internet is a consumer, not an educational environment
• Intention—distract reader to as many ads as quickly as possible for profit
• Click links away from text
• Social distractions—email, Facebook. shopping,
Twitter, games…
• One-to-one instruction—more opportunities for distraction

Information Excess vs Learning Scarcity
• Excess from screens—not easy to focus on page, can click to multiple pages
• Focused from paper—no links or distractions
• We read better with focus than from excess

20% of teens buy eBooks; 80% buy paper books
See: Nielsen Company. Don’t Judge a Book by Its Cover: Tech-
Savvy Teens Remain Fans of Print Books .

• 9% choose eBooks
• 87% choose print books
See: Rosenwald , Michael S. “Why digital natives prefer reading in Print. Yes you read that right.”

Studies Show Students Struggle to Use eBooks Effectively
• Graduate student study:
Alexander Thayer, Charlotte Lee, Linda Hwang, Heidi Sales, Pausali Sen,
Ninad Dalal,
“Imposition and Superimposition of Digital Reading Technology: The
Academic Potential of E-readers”University of Washington Report, 2011
• Undergrad student study: UC Libraries Academic e-Book Usage
Survey, Spring e-Book Pilot Project and Hewlett Packard Survey of San Jose
State University, 2014
• Why Aren’t Teens Reading (for pleasure) Like They Used To

• Passive reading
• Inability to annotate text efficiently
• Inability to create cognitive map of text
• Paper print e-text
• Use highlighters and post-it notes
• Handwritten notes in margins and in notebooks

Understand What Teachers Battle with
Screen Reading
Obstacles of
Electronic Reading
Distractions
Compensating
Strategies
Focus
Surface reading Dive deep
Lacks text markers Visualize concept maps
Lacks interaction Annotate

• Model, practice and apply expert skills from paper to screen and face to face
• Reinforce reading skills see Harvard Library Research Guide
• Find digital tools to discover, curate, and share responses to text example: scoop.it

• Work with teachers to be part of visual literacy development
• Help students to hyper read efficiently
• Battle distraction with software like Freedom or Kobo
Reading Mode
• Use different devices for different tasks: know the strengths and limits of both media
• Pause to process ( NoodleTools )

• Don’t abandon learning outcomes for sake of cost
• Don’t assume that students know how to do meaningful reading on screen or in print
• Don’t assume we know learners’ reading preferences just because of own use of digital devices
See: Baron,Naomi. Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Print.

• Dorothy Mikuska: mikuska1@mac.com
• Marti Seaton: seaton.marti@gmail.com
• Laura Broderick: laura_broderick@glenbard.org