HayU Blog
Deep Reading in the Media Shallows
March 15th, 2022
What happens to our brains when we hold screens instead of books in our hands?
It’s been two years since we transitioned our lives to the zoomisphere. And most of us left some critical cargo behind: physical books.
In pre-pandemic days, students typically consumed a mixture of digital and print media at school. That trend quickly shifted to purely digital content for all too many young minds with no course correction in sight. Many students are still reading and working predominantly online.
Buy a book or check one out at the library? No thanks. There’s an app for that.
What is the impact of reading most or all of our content on screens? Are today’s students retaining or processing less?
I recently had the pleasure of producing a webinar with Maryanne Wolf, a renowned scholar, author and advocate for children’s literacy.
She shared some rather damning research about how our eyes betray us with digital media. While reading on screens, we are unwittingly missing large swathes of information in favor of fast and shallow sampling. Our eyes dip and dive in shocking F or Z patterns, abandoning all kinds of vital information we don’t even realize we’re missing. This habit of visual grazing limits our ability to absorb and connect to the larger meal that should be critical thinking. No wonder comprehension and sustained attention have proven to be weaker on screens for so many of us.
And what about all those enticing hyperlinks we love clicking on to supposedly wade deeper into a topic? They’re often just squirrels distracting us from our own walk.
More alarmingly, Wolf also shared that when we screen skim, we are missing out on golden opportunities for critical analysis, empathy and reflection. This frightens me. We all want our children to be empathic, reflective, critical thinkers.
So what can we do to reverse course? It’s time to use or lose it with books in print.
Parents and educators can model our own love of reading. Parents of small children should read to them often and express affection during this special time. Wolf shared that receptive and expressive language regions are more activated when a parent is reading than when a child is listening to an audiobook or reading on a screen. Ideally, children will read books in print only for the first 10-12 years to build a “biliterate brain” that can process digital and print.- Help children find books they will love. Check out Bookelicious to help children select books by age, interest and reading level. They can even create bookmojis.
- Encourage students to slow down and read difficult content for depth and connection. In Reader, Come Home, Wolf discusses the sad fact that we no longer have the patience to read literature from the nineteenth and early half of the twentieth century. Daily practice will foster deep reading and fight cognitive impatience. Start with a few minutes, and work up from there.
- Utilize active reading strategies to visualize, connect, and question. Check out this reference chart and practice. Anne Mangen’s eye-tracking study found that sequencing events and recalling details are lost when we read on screens. Strengthen comprehension with active reading strategies.
- In Reader, Come Home, Wolf writes, “Separating truth from fiction takes time, information literacy, and an open mind” (94). A lack of deep reading and critical thinking can fuel fake news, so we must teach students about digital literacy. Sam Wineburg, critical analysis researcher at Stanford, created the program Civic Online Reasoning to help students learn how to evaluate information online.
We all know digital content isn’t going anywhere. We’re not going to toss our e-readers and smartphones–but we still have room for books in our hands and in our beds, on couches and on planes and trains.
The reading revolution will not be televised. It can’t be downloaded or captured on a screen.
It only happens when we open a book and turn over a new page.
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