Students Retain Print Information Better,
By Jill Laster

A study at Arizona State University has found that students had lower reading comprehension of online material than they did of a print version.

The report, “To Scroll or Not to Scroll: Scrolling, Working Memory Capacity, and Comprehending Complex Texts,” described how two groups, of 20 students each, wrote essays after reading materials either print or online. Those given the online work to read had an overall lower comprehension of the material.

It is harder to keep track of where information is located within an online document versus the more-apparent page markers in a written text, said Christopher A. Sanchez, a co-author of the study. He is an assistant professor of applied psychology at Arizona State.

But the scrolling interface of online documents had little impact on the students in the study with high working-memory capacity, or a good ability to process and retrieve information. Mr. Sanchez said such people could have more cognitive resources able to remember static locations within an online text.

More study is needed on the impact that scrolling has on learning, he said, especially given the prevalence of online tools in the classroom and in distance learning.

“What it could do is give us recognition of how to better design materials so all people learn well, so we don’t have this group of low-working-memory-capacity individuals who are behind the curve and are for some reason failing to learn when this material is in this scrolling form,” he said.

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The ASU study can be found at:
http://casanchez.faculty.asu.edu/pubs/scroll.pdf

‘Unlike “Digital Barbarism,” Mark Helprin’s shrill 2009 attack on copyright abolitionists, these books are not the work of Luddites or technophobes. Mr. Lanier is a Silicon Valley veteran and a pioneer in the development of virtual reality; Mr. Manjoo, 31, is Slate’s technology columnist; Mr. Keen is a technology entrepreneur; and Mr. Sunstein is a Harvard Law School professor who now heads the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Rather, these authors’ books are nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change — books that stand as insightful counterweights to early techno-utopian works like Esther Dyson’s “Release 2.0” and Nicholas Negroponte’s “Being Digital,” which took an almost Pollyannaish view of the Web and its capacity to empower users.

THESE NEW BOOKS share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.’

Article on line at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/books/21mash.html?th&emc=th