According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a recent study at Arizona State University concluded that students retain information better when reading it in print rather than on a computer screen.
The study divided students into two groups of 20 and required them to write essays after doing readings in either print or screen format. The group that read from a print format understood their readings better, as proven in their essays.
According to professor Christopher A. Sanchez, co-author of the study, this can be attributed to the difficulty in grasping physical page markers when scrolling through an article on a computer, especially for readers with lower working memory capacity. This discovery may have great implications for educational technology, and the way we learn and teach.
Read the full article here.
