E-readers Don’t Affect Reading Comprehension

Tablets and e-readers are quite popular these days. These tiny devices have reached millions of homes already. Not everyone happens to be a fan of them. Some have argued in the past that reading books on e-readers could affect readers’ reading comprehension negatively. Researcher Sara Margolin has taken on this idea by showing 90 students short passages of text. Some read it on paper while others used a Kindle or computer:

Overall accuracy was at around 75 per cent and, crucially, there was no difference in comprehension performance across the three conditions. This was true whether reading factual or narrative passages of text. “From an educational and classroom perspective, these results are comforting,” the researchers concluded. “While new technologies have sometimes been seen as disruptive, these results indicate that students’ comprehension does not necessarily suffer, regardless of the format from which they read their text.”