In-print beats technology-based reading again, slightly, with several caveats.

I remember when the first Apple iPad came out; reading and learning were pretty prominently advertised as “killer apps” for the technology:

Tablets are very popular reading devices for good reasons: you can carry a nearly infinite amount of texts on them, you can highlight and copy text, and you can bookmark and return to texts quickly and easily. That said, there’s a lot of research showing that reading comprehension suffers when using technology versus using printed texts. One potential reason why is called the “shallowing hypothesis” - people typically use technology for shallow, extensive reading. Maybe using technology to learn invokes a similar mindset, making it harder to really learn with it.

But what about tablets? They kind of look like books, you can kind of hold them like books, and you can even “flip” the pages - so, maybe their “bookishness” (meant in the kindest way) eliminates the technology penalty for reading comprehension?

Well, maybe a little but not fully. Salmeron and colleagues (2023) conducted a meta-analysis of in-print versus tablet-based reading and found people who used the latter had slightly (g = -.113), but statistically detectable, poorer reading comprehension performance.

But, given how small the effect was, maybe the affordances of tablets (e.g., easy of accessing texts, highlighting, etc.) outweigh the negatives? Hold up there. The authors very appropriately noted many limitations in the literature, including the lack of studies with large, random samples. The two studies that did have a large random sample showed a larger technology penalty. Likewise, most of the studies used multiple-choice questions of reading comprehension, which may not be challenging enough to elicit the effect. In the six studies with higher-order reading outcomes, the technology penalty was larger. So, like the authors, I think the literature makes a case against tablets for reading and learning, but the full story is we just need more research.

I’d love to see research with larger samples, more challenging reading outcomes, and more learner autonomy. That last point is a big one. I want to see a year-long RCT with in-print texts and tablets, looking at not just reading comprehension outcomes, but also how much reading people do, how much they enjoy and/or are motivated to read, and how their reading performance might be moderated by their ability to inhibit the temptations of tablets (e.g., checking email, going online and browsing while reading). In the end, the affordances of tablets (as illustrated in the iPad ad) might outweigh in-print texts under the right circumstances, but as of yet, there’s no evidence for that.