Print Your Child’s E-Books
I don’t read many e-books with my child, but I can definitely appreciate their convenience. They’re just great for travel (get this from the man who just helped my daughter drag a backpack full of giant textbooks onto the plane). They can also cost less per headline than printed versions, and may include additional features such as built-in dictionaries, reading features, and updates on evolving topics such as Pluto’s planetary status. In schools, students are fast moving towards a paperless future – textbook company Pearson recently announced that it is going “digital,” moving away from the traditional printing model. As a parent concerned about the downward trend in reading by nine , I am totally in favor of encouraging children to read in any form – and if it is on screen, so be it.
However, if your child really has a piece of material to digest, it’s probably best to print it out.
When Virginia Clinton, an assistant professor of education at the University of North Dakota, dived deeply into 33 high-quality laboratory studies, most of it found that students of all ages tended to learn more when they read on paper. This applies only to nonfictional informative texts. While the benefits of reading on a printed page have been small, the Hechinger Report explains, Clinton’s analysis is now “at least the third study to summarize authoritative research on reading comprehension in the digital age and find paper to be better.”
It’s not entirely clear why paper seems to rule when it comes to reading comprehension. Digital distraction is the obvious answer: we know that even as adults, open tabs and constant notifications are catnip for our brains. However, in these lab studies, web browsing or application testing was not permitted. Speed is also not to blame, as Clinton ” found no difference in read time between the two formats.” One of her suspicions is that when people read from the screen, they overestimate their ability to understand the material. This makes sense: when we think we already understand something, we stop making so much effort.
Sometimes, when I need to fully understand what I’m reading, I often print pages, grab a pen to take notes in the margins, and flop away from the screens. I think this might be useful for kids who may have trouble understanding certain popular science material, whether it’s something from their world history lesson or a practical guide to planning a trip to space. When printing pages from e-books, you are usually limited to a certain percentage of the total work due to digital rights management (DRM) restrictions. Typically, to find out how many pages you can print or download from an e-book, you can choose to “print” or “download”. Or just buy paper copies of your child’s most important books .
Using any book, on paper or on a screen, you can help your child remember information by asking him to predict what he is going to read , asking him to teach you the material and show them how to change passive learning tasks for active ones . This will help them improve their reading comprehension skills even in the future when they may simply ask, “What is a printer?”