The quality of understanding printed and digital educational texts

Abstract

Student understanding of educational texts has always been a relevant issue in pedagogy and educational psychology. As modern society is adopting digital technologies, digital texts are becoming increasingly important, hence a need to read and understand not only printed but also digital texts. This study aims to investigate the impact of the form in which educational texts are presented on the quality of their understanding. Both theoretical and empirical methods were applied. In the empirical part of the study, an analysis of the data on the academic performance of the subjects was conducted; the method for determining the level of reading skills development by L. A. Yasyukova was used, along with a set of test tasks aimed at identifying the nature of text comprehension. The article presents the data of an experimental study which compared the comprehension of texts in paper and digital forms. It also identifies the moderating role of the gender, academic performance, and the level of the reading skill in the comprehension of educational texts on different media. It also describes the relationships between text comprehension parameters, factorizes the obtained data. The importance of factual information in comprehending text presented on electronic media is demonstrated. When working with printed text, greater emphasis is placed on understanding the holistic content of the text. The total number of interrelations between comprehension parameters during reading from paper exceeds the total number of such interrelations during reading from electronic media. The quality of middle school students’ comprehension of instructional text presented on electronic media differs from the quality of comprehension of instructional text presented on paper. To foster productive digital reading, the have developed a memo for students titled “Digital Reading Strategies,” which recommends approaches for reading electronic texts.