Reading vs. Screening

As we do more of our reading on a screen, what does that mean for our students? Alex Beam from the Boston Globe reports on several different studies about the difference in reading on paper and reading on a screen, which blogger Danny Bloom is calling "screening". For starters, it looks like most of us lose 25-40% of the text when reading on a screen. We need to teach our kids about the differences in the reading experiences and strategies. In some cases, they have a choice between paper and online, and need to know how and when to choose one over the other. What about when we test reading abilities on a screen? Does it mean the test is less accurate than on paper, or just different?

The article cites a number of sources, but doesn't link to them, and I would like to explore some of the further, so I'm putting some links in here (one of the major potential advantages to reading online, but usually overlooked by newspapers when they put their product up on the Internet.)

• Web usability expert Jacob Neilsen's Useit
  
• Why Web Users Scan Instead of Read - from Useit.com
  
• Kindle 2 Usability Review - from Useit.com
  
• Why don't we read so well on a screen? Press release about article by Anne Mangan in the Journal of Research in Reading, which says that reading on a screen gives us more brain stress than reading the same text on paper.
  
• Are you 'reading' or 'screening' this by Danny Bloom