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Screen no match for the page in education

By Mark Bauerlein - posted Monday, 13 October 2008


When Jakob Nielsen, a web researcher, tested 232 people for how they read pages on screens, a curious disposition emerged. Dubbed "the guru of web page usability" by The New York Times, Nielsen has gauged user habits and screen experiences for years, charting people's online navigations and aims, using eye-tracking tools to map how vision moves and rests.

In this study he found that people took in hundreds of pages "in a pattern that's very different from what you learned in school". It looks like a capital letter F. At the top, users read all the way across, but as they proceed their descent quickens and horizontal sight contracts, with a slowdown near the middle of the page. Near the bottom, eyes move almost vertically; the lower right corner of the page is largely ignored. It happens quickly, too. "F for fast," Nielsen wrote in a column. "That's how users read your precious content."

The F-pattern isn't the only odd feature of online reading that Nielsen has uncovered in studies conducted through the consulting business Nielsen Norman Group. (Donald A. Norman is a cognitive scientist who came from Apple; Nielsen was at Sun Microsystems.) A decade ago, he issued an alert entitled How Users Read on the Web. It opened bluntly: "They don't."

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In the eye-tracking test, only one in six subjects read web pages linearly, sentence by sentence. The rest jumped around chasing keywords, bullet points, visuals, and colour and typeface variations. In another experiment on how people read e-newsletters, informational email messages and news feeds, Nielsen noted: "Reading is not even the right word."

The subjects usually read only the first two words in headlines and they ignored the introductory sections. They wanted the nut and nothing else.

A 2003 Nielsen warning asserted that a PDF file strikes users as a content blob and they won't read it unless they print it out. A book-like page on screen, it seems, turns them off and sends them away.

Another Nielsen test found that teenagers skip through the web even faster than adults do, but with a lower success rate for completing tasks online (55 per cent compared with 66 per cent). Nielsen writes: "Teens have a short attention span and want to be stimulated. That's also why they leave sites that are difficult to figure out." For them, the web isn't a place for reading and study and knowledge. It spells the opposite. "Teenagers don't like to read a lot on the web. They get enough of that at school."

Those and other trials by Nielsen amount to an important research project that helps explain one of the great disappointments of education in our time: the huge investment schools have made in technology and the meagre returns such funds have earned. At the same time, universities have raced to out-technologise one another. But while enthusiasm swells, smart classrooms multiply and students cheer, the results remain negative.

When University of Chicago economists evaluated California schools before and after federal technology subsidies had granted 30 per cent more schools in the state internet access, they determined that "the additional investments in technology ... had no immediate impact on measured student outcomes".

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In March 2007, the US National Centre for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance evaluated 16 award-winning education technologies and found that "test scores were not significantly higher in classrooms using selected reading and mathematics software products".

Last spring a New York state school district decided to drop its laptop program after years of offering it. The school board president announced why: "After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement: none."

Those conclusions apply to middle school and high school programs, not to higher education (which has yet to produce any similarly large-scale evaluations). Nevertheless, the results bear consideration by those pushing for more e-learning on campuses.

Our students have worked and played with computers for years. Educators envision a whole new pedagogy with the tools, but students see only the chance to extend long-established postures towards the screen. They race across the surface, dicing language and ideas into bullets and graphics, seeking what they already want and shunning the rest. They convert history, philosophy, literature, civics and fine art into information, material to retrieve and pass along.

That's the drift of screen reading. Yes, it's a kind of literacy, but it breaks down in the face of a dense argument, a modernist poem, a long political tract and other texts that require steady focus and linear attention: in a word, slow reading. Fast scanning doesn't foster flexible minds that can adapt to all kinds of texts and it doesn't translate into academic reading. If it did, then in a 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education survey of college professors, 41 per cent wouldn't have labelled students "not well prepared" in reading (48 per cent rated them "somewhat well prepared").

We would see reading scores inching upwards instead of seeing, for instance, that the percentage of high school students who reached proficiency dropped from 40 per cent to 35 per cent between 1992 and 2005.

And we wouldn't see even the better students struggling with slow-reading tasks. In an Introduction to Poetry class a while back, when I asked students to memorise 20 lines of verse and recite them to the others at the next meeting, a voice blurted, "Why?" The student wasn't being impudent or sullen. She just didn't see any purpose or value in the task. Canny and quick, she judged the plodding process of recording others' words a primitive exercise. Besides, if you can call up the verse any time with a click, why remember it?

Advocates of e-learning in higher education pursue a risky policy, striving to unite liberal-arts learning with the devices of acceleration that hinder it. Professors think they can help students adjust to using tools in a more sophisticated way than scattershot e-reading, but it's a lopsided battle.

What we are seeing is a strange flattening of the act of reading. It equates handheld screens with Madame Bovary, as if they made the same cognitive demands and inculcated the same habits of attention. It casts peeking at a text message and ploughing through Middlemarch as subsets of one general activity. And it treats those quick bursts of words and icons as fully sufficient to sustain the reading culture. The long book may go, according Leah Price, a professor of English at Harvard University, but reading will carry on just as it did before. "The file, the list, the label, the memo: these (genres) will keep reading alive."

We must recognise that screen scanning is but one kind of reading, a lesser one, and that it conspires against certain intellectual habits requisite to liberal-arts learning. The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger's ontic-ontological difference until it breaks through as a transformative insight: those dispositions melt away with every 100 hours of browsing, blogging, IM-ing, Twittering, and Facebooking.

The shape and tempo of online texts differ so much from academic texts that e-learning initiatives in university classrooms can't bridge them. Screen reading is a mindset and we should accept its variance from academic thinking.

Nielsen concisely outlines the difference: "I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don't believe the web is optimal for delivering this experience ... We should accept that the web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets, so long as the learner has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts."

So let's restrain the digitising of all liberal-arts classrooms. More than that, given the tidal wave of technology, let's frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged and logged off.

That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitise learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students' minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate and they can't do it by themselves, especially if every inch of the campus is on the grid.

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First published in The Australian on October 8, 2008.



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About the Author

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and has worked as a Director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he oversaw studies about culture and American life. He lives with his family in Atlanta. Mark is the author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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