KQED News Mind/Shift – Claudia Wallis
“Many of us book lovers cherish the tactile qualities of print, but some of this preference is emotional or nostalgic. Do reading and note-taking on paper offer any measurable advantages for learning? Given the high cost of hard-backed textbooks, is it wiser to save the money and the back strain by going digital? You might think that, decades into the digital revolution, we would have a clear answer to this question. Wrong. Earlier this year educational psychologist Patricia Alexander, a literacy scholar at the University of Maryland, published a thorough review of recent research on the topic. She was “shocked,” she says, to find that out of 878 potentially relevant studies published between 1992 and 2017, only 36 directly compared reading in digital and in print and measured learning in a reliable way.”(more)