Electronic schoolbooks may be the wave of the future, but they
don't necessarily bring improved student performance:
Teachers, parents and policymakers certainly acknowledge the growing influence of technology and have responded in kind. We’ve seen more investment in classroom technologies, with students now equipped with school-issued iPads and access to e-textbooks. In 2009, California passed a law requiring that all college textbooks be available in electronic form by 2020; in 2011, Florida lawmakers passed legislation requiring public schools to convert their textbooks to digital versions.
Given this trend, teachers, students, parents and policymakers might assume that students’ familiarity and preference for technology translates into better learning outcomes. But we’ve found that’s not necessarily true.
As researchers in learning and text comprehension, our recent work has focused on the differences between reading print and digital media. While new forms of classroom technology like digital textbooks are more accessible and portable, it would be wrong to assume that students will automatically be better served by digital reading simply because they prefer it.
Our work has revealed a significant discrepancy. Students said they preferred and performed better when reading on screens. But their actual performance tended to suffer.
The authors begin their conclusion thusly:
There may be economic and environmental reasons to go paperless. But there’s clearly something important that would be lost with print’s demise.
All of our students are issued IPads for a nominal insurance fee. Those machines are supposed to be for online educational goals via Canvas. What the students really do with these machines are very different. They play games-lots of games. They watch movies and TV. They message each other. When the district blocked some of these functions, students rebelled by not bringing their IPads, meaning that any of the online digital content we the teachers are supposed to use, is useless. Fun times. Oh, and yes we do have digital books for some classes. I can see exactly how many times students have bothered to go online and do the reading. For even my best students it is less than half the time.
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