Books vs Screens for Learning

[gleem]

Over the last decade or so, computers have become the medium of choice in education. Those of us who were brought up with books often found using a computer to read a bit uncomfortable. I believe, even as we acclimate to this new medium, we still find satisfaction in reading a book. Outside of the comfort of a book, is there any advantage to using one? Neuroscience says yes. Comprehension is better when learning from a book.

Jared Cooney Horvath, a high school math teacher turned neuroscientist, explains in a video why using computers to learn in schools is not helpful. Like many tech aids to education, such as movies and video discs, which promised to make learning easier and replace teachers, the internet and computers have not lived up to manufacturers' hype.

Hovath is the author of many videos and two books to help teachers understand the science of learning to improve their teaching. To be sure, if you know how to learn, computers are a great tool for learning.

If you have the time and are interested, you should listen to an interview with Horvath discussing his view on the use of computers in education. It is about his views in his book "The Digital Dilusion." His premise is that computers do not help you learn how to learn.

Remembering that school STEM programs have not lived up to their expectations in producing the number of college grads in STEM fields, one wonders what the problem was. My original speculation was that they made the STEM fields look like a lot of fun without the work needed to be successful. On entering university, they lacked the grit to deal with the work. But now I am thinking that these school programs probably heavily depend on the use of computers. Thus, when the learning requirements were more of the responsibility of the student, they did't know how to handle it.

 

[gmax137]

The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.

In other words, one-on-one dialog between student and teacher.

Mark Hopkins (February 4, 1802 – June 17, 1887) was an American educator and Congregationalist theologian, president of Williams College from 1836 to 1872.

The student beer bar in Williamstown is called "The Log"

Regarding books vs. screens, my feeling is "books" are better. But that might be because that's how I learned. I think they said similar about whiteboards: "Chalk on a slate is proven superior."

 

[Hornbein]

I find them about the same. Computers have the advantage of being able to search the text automatically, so even if I have a book the online text can be useful.

I did however attempt to read Macbeth on a computer and gave up immediately. It felt so wrong.

Hmm Beth, that would be a good name for a computer of a certain celebrated brand...

Different people learn differently (visual, aural). I have never seen any mention of this fundamental fact since Richard Feynman investigated this during his student days. Too bad. Teaching seems to me unimproved since ancient times. Writing on a board and having the students copy it dates from the days that books were too expensive.

As for whiteboards, in a small room those solvents (acetone?) hurt my nose. Mom always said I was too sensitive.

 

[gleem]

Regarding books vs. screens, my feeling is "books" are better. But that might be because that's how I learned.

That was my feeling too, but apparently it is harder to take the knowledge learned on a screen and use it in the real world, that is, to transition that knowledge to another context.

I am reminded of the work of Edward Redish of the University of Maryland, who studied the retention of physics principles taught in general physics courses. He found that students who were able to use the learned physics principles in the course often lost the ability to use them outside the course, reverting to their original, naive concepts. The courses failed to transition this knowledge to their personal world.

I find them about the same. Computers have the advantage of being able to search the text automatically, so even if I have a book the online text can be useful.

Computers are tools most useful to improve productivity, but for learning, not so much. The thesis is that if computers are not better than books to learn and transferring that knowledge to other contexts, why use computers, especially when computers are more often viewed and used by students for recreational purposes and therefore a persistent distraction?

Another thought. Information on a computer is sequestered imperceptibly on a hard drive or in the cloud. My somewhat downsized library shows me what I once knew and understood. When I look at a book that I studied, I am reminded of and know its content not exactly, but I know where to look for specific information that I cannot explicitly recall. Learning from abook has a three-dimensional aspect to it. After all, we generally learn everything else in three dimensions.

Different people learn differently (visual, aural). I have never seen any mention of this fundamental fact since Richard Feynman investigated this during his student days. Too bad. Teaching seems to me unimproved since ancient times. Writing on a board and having the students copy it dates from the days that books were too expensive.

According to neuroscience and Horvath, we all learn the same, and that focusing on one mode of learning is overall detrimental to the learning process. That said, people may have preferences on how they want to learn.

 

[Hornbein]

According to neuroscience and Horvath, we all learn the same, and that focusing on one mode of learning is overall detrimental to the learning process. That said, people may have preferences on how they want to learn.

There are definitely two ways of learning a foreign. I can't do it by ear, I have to learn visually. Those who learn by ear are much quicker but also forget more quickly and can even forget their native language. They can memorize whole phrases without knowing what the words mean. I can't do that at all.

When I was a kid I read the encyclopedia. I tried that with Wikipedia and found that half the entries were histories of USA high schools. It was no use.

I recently went into a cafe and they had a dozen full sets of encyclopedias decorating the walls. People had gotten rid of them. I wish I had one of those sets.

Allowing kids to have smart phones in school is a predictatable fail.

 

[gleem]

There are definitely two ways of learning a foreign. I can't do it by ear, I have to learn visually. Those who learn by ear are much quicker but also forget more quickly and can even forget their native language. They can memorize whole phrases without knowing what the words mean. I can't do that at all.

Use it or lose it applies to all knowledge, no matter how you learned. Languages in general are sensitive to intonations ans some are extremely sensitive to intonation, such as Mandarin and Nihongo (Japan).

Anyway, the point of the thread is related to how our teaching strategies are useful to the majority of students. Neuordiverse students require individualized teaching, and computers can be an important tool for them. Is it worth the millions of dollars that school districts spend each year on hardware and software for a tool that hurts learning and disenfranchises students who lack reliable internet access?

If computers are helpful in education, why the learning setback during Covid when computers were the go-to tool for teaching? This alone should have sent an attention-getting message.

 

[gmax137]

why the learning setback during Covid when computers were the go-to tool for teaching?

Off hand I would suspect that the vast majority of teachers (and students) don't really know how to teach (and learn) "using computers." I could be wrong about that: I'm so out of date that Jimmy Carter was president during my most recent classroom activity. Teachers have been lecturing, writing on blackboards, and assigning reading for centuries. They know how to do that.

 

[gleem]

Off hand I would suspect that the vast majority of teachers (and students) don't really know how to teach (and learn) "using computers."

There are no studies that show computers are an advantage for learning over traditional methods. There were no pilot studies to show how to use computers when they were introduced. Students and teachers are guinea pigs, and current assessments of students' progress show no effect.

 

[Dale]

There are no studies that show computers are an advantage for learning over traditional methods

So you are claiming that if I look into, for example, the journal Computers and Education, started in 1976, that I will not find one single paper showing an advantage for computers. Not one.

https://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=17645&tip=sid&clean=0

 

[Jonathan Scott]

I recently went into a cafe and they had a dozen full sets of encyclopedias decorating the walls. People had gotten rid of them. I wish I had one of those sets.

I wish we had someone around here (UK) who wanted my Encyclopaedia Britannica!

I've been trying to donate or sell it for years. It's 15th Edition, 1989 revision, plus all year books from 1990 until they stopped in 2012, plus "Science and the Future" volumes and "Medical and Health" volumes from 1990 until they stopped doing them in 2000 and 1999, plus some dictionaries and an Atlas which came free with it, making over 80 volumes in total. The main encyclopaedia cost about 1000 UK pounds and the year books probably a further 1300. It's essentially as good as new, as I rarely used it and was very careful with it. I bought it because I previously had access to a friend's copy (much more heavily used) and found it extremely interesting, and I was persuaded in 1990 that it was also a "good investment". It looks impressive, but I had already read most of the articles on the subjects which most interested me, and I no longer find it worth the space it is taking up. In many ways the year books are more interesting than the encyclopaedia, as they contain interesting articles and historical information about each preceding year, and I read each one as it arrived. Charities here don't accept encyclopaedias as donations because they don't sell quickly and take too much space. We've tried eBay but there were already lots of others already failing to sell, even for very low prices. We did find a "books for Africa" donation possibility, but we would have to pay a lot to package and ship the books to the charity, which is really frustrating.​

As for books, I read thousands when young (starting before age 3), but when it comes to learning I find it helpful to have good random access, so I can skip and revise easily. I find that for the same book, reading it on a computer or large tablet (as PDF or well-organised HTML) often makes that easier. It's also easier to carry my large tablet around with me than a collection of books. However, it seems more difficult to find the same quality of information online as I can find in my shelves full of text books.

One thing which I find really maddening is when books have been made available online as HTML in a hierarchy of topics but without a "next" and "previous" link, so one has to navigate through the table of contents to get to the next sequential topic.

Online IBM publications were migrated to a new "IBM Docs" format a few years ago which omits such links, which makes them really difficult to read sequentially, including tutorial chapters which were written specifically to be read in that way. The IBM z/OS team objected strongly and agreed to fund changes to add "next" links for their books (apparently done by updating the books, not the tooling), but publications for other areas are now much less usable unless the users downloads a PDF version, which is still available, but we found that users were then having problems because that meant they relied on previously downloaded books and failed to pick up corrections and new function, totally undermining the point of online documentation.​

 

[Muu9]

There certainly are advantages to using computers to manage things like spaced repetition schedules for individual pieces of knowledge, which is what Anki does

 

[Jonathan Scott]

I've never liked live classroom lectures, as the speed is rarely right for me. Most of the time it's far too slow, but occasionally I find an interesting point and wish I could think about it more. So from that point of view, I've always preferred learning at my own speed from written materials. I've learned several programming languages by reading their reference manuals; the only snag is that I often have difficulty remembering which one is which. But I've been a bit surprised to find there are people even in my area of computer programming who prefer to be told stuff rather than reading about it (and those are often the ones whose code appears to have been constructed using very limited techniques because they weren't aware of more powerful possibilities).

Thinking more about books versus screens, I think a critical point is whether the process of using the screen can be made sufficiently instinctive that it does not distract from or interrupt one's focus on the content, and that of course depends on such factors as consistent conventions and familiarity with the tools. Another problem with screens is that there seems to be a fashion to have a lot of unnecessary white space, reducing the amount that one can see without scrolling, which can make it more difficult to understand.

I find reading a PDF book on a tablet perfectly acceptable provided that the tablet is large enough that I can comfortably see a whole page (mine's a Samsung Tab S9 Ultra which is large enough for most sheet music).

Of course, it's even worse when writing rather than reading. I have long been frustrated that when I'm making physics-related notes, complications in the process of entering them on a computer often disrupts my physics thinking, so I often sketch things with pencil and paper first, then type them into my computer notes later. I use MS OneNote on Windows with its WYSIWYG equation editor for short notes, which I can copy and paste into Word for longer-term more organised notes. For anything more formal or book-like, I use LaTeX, although I find it maddening that I've not found any reliable way to convert combined material (text with equations) between OneNote or Word and LaTeX.

Similarly, I find that even when I'm writing plain text using a WYSIWYG editor such as MS Word, my thoughts are often distracted by issues relating to layout, spacing and so on, but if I write in a mark-up language such as LaTeX or IBM BookMaster (an ancestor of HTML) I could leave many of those issues to a separate step later. And I'm definitely a fan of symbol and macro definitions in mark-up languages - rather than being held back by trying to finalise some terminology or notation as I went along, I would use a symbol or macro for it with a placeholder value, and change it later to see what worked best. Catering for grammatical variations was a bit tricky, allowing for plural forms which didn't simply add "s", and being preceded by "an" instead of "a" if it starts with a vowel, and an initial capital letter if it starts a sentence; I often ended up with definitions for &thing, &things, &athing, &Thing, &Things, &Athing!

 

[Grinkle]

Regarding the anecdotal declarations in this thread, I wonder how it can be possible to overcome the bias injected by ones own experience. I learned exclusively from textbooks until after my formal education was completed. For my core engineering courses, books were not terribly helpful to me, but for other subjects they were.

My real learning of math and math heavy STEM came from doing exercises, the textbook were initial orientation and reference. I recall the most effective learning for me came during group study sessions where we would take turns solving exercises on the board while explaining what we were doing to those sitting waiting to take their turn at the board. I cannot see a computer being as effective as another student at roughly my same level interacting with me as we both figure new concepts out. I can see a computer perhaps being a better aid for all of us in the room than the drill exercises and solutions that we would reference if we got stuck, though. I am not certain of that - a computer might be too tempting as a short cut to the answer - the solutions to the exercises in printed form that one could buy in collections of such things I recall often being very hard to follow, terse and sketchy. We used such publications (solved problems collections) as our study aid in these sessions. I think a computer might be too clear and we wouldn't have needed to put in the same effort to get to or understand the solution.

Non-STEM subjects or math-light subjects, eg history, economics, philosophy, composition etc, I cannot imagine trying to learn from a computer - I readily learn these primarily from books and I find that process enjoyable. That statement excludes what I consider the trivial media selection of e-book vs paper book - I can learn such subjects as readily from an e-reader as from a paper book, although I agree with a previous post by @gleem that a printed book is much easier to use subsequently as a reference.

Its a fact that if I am going to read a STEM related publication I always print it to read it if I am home and can do so. Most of my reading post-education has been non-STEM, and I rarely buy printed books any more because I enjoy having my entire library available to me from that single small device.

 

[WWGD]

Use it or lose it applies to all knowledge, no matter how you learned. Languages in general are sensitive to intonations ans some are extremely sensitive to intonation, such as Mandarin and Nihongo (Japan).

Anyway, the point of the thread is related to how our teaching strategies are useful to the majority of students. Neuordiverse students require individualized teaching, and computers can be an important tool for them. Is it worth the millions of dollars that school districts spend each year on hardware and software for a tool that hurts learning and disenfranchises students who lack reliable internet access?

If computers are helpful in education, why the learning setback during Covid when computers were the go-to tool for teaching? This alone should have sent an attention-getting message.

There were some absurd cases of students taught to swim through computer- based classes (Edit) during Covid. Students almost drowned when asked to swim in an actual pool.

 

[gleem]

So you are claiming that if I look into, for example, the journal Computers and Education, started in 1976, that I will not find one single paper showing an advantage for computers.

There are advantages, but Horvath claims there are no studies that conclusively show that using computers as a learning medium is any better than traditional methods, but that it hinders the transfer of material learned in the classroom to the real world.

It is not unexpected that many on his forum having learned traditionally have little problem with using and continuing to learn on computers. I think we all took responsibility for our education into our own hands. We generally found our way early in our education, some sooner than later. Some are true autodidacts. But the majority of students are merely whisked along in the educational system with little focus on the purpose of their being in school. This is the group where teaching skills and policy has its greatest effect.

I think we all agree that good teachers are the key to good learning. Can putting a student in a cubicle for 12 years with a computer produce a happy and productive citizen? With AI, can't we hear school district superintendents thinking, do we need teachers?

Ever since the 1960's, education has been in turmoil with no cure in sight. Culture notwithstanding, trend after trend supported by money thrown at teachers, with the result that they are not allowed to teach. I thought that Jared Horvath's views would be of interest to many on this forum.

 

[Dale]

Horvath claims there are no studies that conclusively show …

I suspect that either Horvath is simply wrong or that he is defining “conclusively show” in a personal way so as to make his conclusion come out the way he wants.

A claim that “no studies” show something is pretty sketchy on its face, particularly when there are literally 50 year old journals on this topic.

A computer is a tool. All tools have their uses and their limitations. I would avoid blanket statements about either extreme.

Just a first hit:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2009.08.027
Computers helped with English reading comprehension, students with low proficiency were benefited more than students with high proficiency. Is Horvath unaware of this study, or is he using "conclusively show" to dismiss it?

A third hit from the same search:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.11.005
Computers helped teach probability. They specifically targeted common probabilistic misconceptions with the computer-based intervention, and compared the computer-based intervention with traditional instruction. So, computers can be useful in teaching in specific cases.

Here is a first hit from a different search:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2024.105127
In this one immersive virtual reality performed worse than paper-based learning for vocational education. This is despite the fact that students felt like they had learned more, they had in fact learned less. So, computers have specific beneficial use cases and specific use cases that are not as beneficial as people might assume.

Blanket statements just seem unjustified to me.

 

[gleem]

A computer is a tool. All tools have their uses and their limitations. I would avoid blanket statements about either extreme.

Jared Horvath was a math teacher who now has twenty years expericence as a cognitive neuroscientist. He states that his primary job now is to take current research and interpret it for educators. I may not have reported his claims failthfully that is why I recommended viewing the interview. I take it he knows what he is talking about.

In this one immersive virtual reality performed worse than paper-based learning for vocational education. This is despite the fact that students felt like they had learned more, they had in fact learned less.

I wonder how virtual training compares to hands-on training, which I would have supposed is the standard method for vocational education.

 

[symbolipoint]

There are definitely two ways of learning a foreign. I can't do it by ear, I have to learn visually. Those who learn by ear are much quicker but also forget more quickly and can even forget their native language. They can memorize whole phrases without knowing what the words mean. I can't do that at all.

Find what is the difference between Language Acquisition and Language Study.

 

[Hornbein]

Find what is the difference between Language Acquisition and Language Study.

If you're too lazy to tell me what it is then I'm too lazy to look it up.

 

[symbolipoint]

If you're too lazy to tell me what it is then I'm too lazy to look it up.

No matter. Seriously I still suggest look for the meaning of each of those. They are not exactly the same thing. My trying to tell you what they are is not much more than just trying to give an opinion. Look on your own for what each of those are.

 

[jbergman]

Over the last decade or so, computers have become the medium of choice in education. Those of us who were brought up with books often found using a computer to read a bit uncomfortable. I believe, even as we acclimate to this new medium, we still find satisfaction in reading a book. Outside of the comfort of a book, is there any advantage to using one? Neuroscience says yes. Comprehension is better when learning from a book.

Jared Cooney Horvath, a high school math teacher turned neuroscientist, explains in a video why using computers to learn in schools is not helpful. Like many tech aids to education, such as movies and video discs, which promised to make learning easier and replace teachers, the internet and computers have not lived up to manufacturers' hype.

Hovath is the author of many videos and two books to help teachers understand the science of learning to improve their teaching. To be sure, if you know how to learn, computers are a great tool for learning.

If you have the time and are interested, you should listen to an interview with Horvath discussing his view on the use of computers in education. It is about his views in his book "The Digital Dilusion." His premise is that computers do not help you learn how to learn.

Remembering that school STEM programs have not lived up to their expectations in producing the number of college grads in STEM fields, one wonders what the problem was. My original speculation was that they made the STEM fields look like a lot of fun without the work needed to be successful. On entering university, they lacked the grit to deal with the work. But now I am thinking that these school programs probably heavily depend on the use of computers. Thus, when the learning requirements were more of the responsibility of the student, they did't know how to handle it.

Paper is more relaxing. Something about screens annoys me. The only exception are Kindle Paperwhites.