David Daniel and I have a letter in latest issue of Science. It's behind a paywall, so I thought I'd provide a summary of the substance.

David and I note that there is, in some quarters, a rush to replace conventional paper textbooks with electronic textbooks. It is especially noteworthy that members of the Obama administration are eager to speed this transition. (See this report.)

On the face of it, this transition is obvious: most people seem to like reading on their Nook, Kindle or iPad--certainly sales of the devices and of ebooks are booming. And electronic textbooks offer obvious advantages that traditional textbooks don't, most notably easy updates, and embedded features such as hyperlinks, video, and collaboration software.

But David and I urged more caution.

We should note that there are not many studies out there regarding the use of electronic textbooks, but those that exist show mixed results. A consistent finding is that, given the choice, students prefer traditional textbooks. That's true regardless of their experience with ebooks, so it's not because students are unfamiliar with them (Woody, Daniel & Baker, 2010). Further, some data indicate that reading electronic textbooks, although it leads to comparable comprehension, takes longer (e.g., Dillon, 1992; Woody et al, 2010).

Why don't students like electronic textbooks if they like ebooks? The two differ. Ebooks typically often have a narrative structure,  they are usually pretty easy to read, and we read them for pleasure. Textbooks in contrast, have a hierarchical structure, the material is difficult and unfamiliar, and we read them for learning and retention. Students likely interact with textbooks differently than books they read for pleasure.

That may be why the data for electronic books are more promising for early grades. Elementary reading books tend of have a narrative structure, and students are not asked to study from the books as older kids are.

Further, many publishers are not showing a lot of foresight in how they integrate video and other features in the electronic textbooks. A decade of research (much of it by Rich Mayer and his collaborators and students) show that multimedia learning is more complex than one would think. Videos, illustrative simulations, hyperlinked definitions--all these can aid comprehension OR hurt comprehension, depending on sometimes subtle differences in how they are placed in the text, the specifics of the visuals, the individual abilities of readers, and so on.

None of this is to say that electronic textbooks are a bad thing, or indeed to deny that they ought to replace traditional textbooks. But two points ought to be kept in mind.
(1) The great success of ebooks as simply the porting over of traditional books into another format may not translate to electronic textbooks. Textbooks have different content, different structure, and they are read for different purposes.
(2) Electronic textbooks stand a much higher chance of success if publishers will exploit the rich research literature on multimedia learning, but most are not doing so.

For these two reasons, it's too early to pick the flag and shout "Hurrah!" on electronic textbooks.


A. Dillon, Ergonomics 35, 1297 (1992).
W. D. Woody, D. B. Daniel, C. Baker , Comput. Educ. 55, 945 (2010)

Today's New York Times has an article speculating that when you read on an ereader or tablet, your attention is likely to be diverted to other applications.

If you hit a dull patch in the book, can you resist the pull of YouTube, Twitter, or your email? Even if you're engaged in the book, Google may beckon to clarify a point in the book ("Essex? Where's that?") and next thing you know, 25 minutes have elapsed in surfing. Perhaps interesting, perhaps productive, but not what you sat down intending to do.

Many people I've spoken with have the impression that this sort of distraction is predictable, and that it is a greater problem when reading on a tablet computer, even compared to reading a print book with a computer nearby.

The data on this question are still thin, but I do know of one relevant study (Woody et al, 2011). Nearly 300 college students took part, each reading a chapter from an introductory psychology textbook in one of five formats: print textbook, printed text pages, printed manuscript in MS Word, electronic pdf file, or electronic textbook. Some students read in a laboratory, some at home, and everyone took a quiz on the chapter material after reading it.

The results showed that media format did not affect quiz grades. But students who read electronic media versions were more likely to respond to instant messages and email while reading, and were more likely to use social networking sites (Facebook/Myspace) while reading.

It's only one experiment, but this feels like an instance where the intuitions of the majority of people will end up according with data. Whether the extra level of distraction is really a problem remains to be seen; and it may well be that users (or software designers) come up with strategies to solve the problem, if it proves significant.

Woody, W. D., Daniel, D. B., & Stewart, J. M. (2011).  Students’ Preferences and Performance  Using E-Textbooks and Print Textbooks.  In F. Columbus (Ed.), Computers in Education.  New York: Nova Publishing.

There’s a new article (Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012) out in Psychological Bulletin (commonly considered the premier outlet for large literature reviews), which summarizes a great deal of data on phonological skills and reading.

The broad conclusions will startle no one who follows this research literature—we know phonological skills are important--but the article is notable for making a couple of finer-grain distinctions.

It is sensible that a child’s ability to understand that words are composed of sounds should be important in learning to read. After all, letters and groups of letters correspond to sound, they don’t signify meaning directly. If that weren’t true you wouldn’t be able to read nonsense words like “flotupe.” Letters signify sounds, and decoding means that kids must match letters (T) and groups of letters (TH) to sound. That means they must first appreciate that words are composed of sounds.

There has been some debate, however, as to the size of the sound unit that matters: the phoneme, or rimes and onsets. The onset refers to the consonant string that precedes a vowel sound, and the rime refers to the vowel and any consonants that follow. Hence, in the word TRIP, the onset would be /TR/ and the rime would be /IP/.

Other researchers have suggested that children must appreciate still smaller sound units—phonemes—as preparation for reading. Phonemes are individual speech sounds that cannot be further subdivided. For example, the rime /IP/ is composed of two phonemes: /I/ and /P/. Perhaps it helps if kids perceive that /IP/ is really two sounds. . .but perhaps that’s not necessary. (And indeed, perceiving that the letter P goes with the individual speech sound /P/ is no small feat, because /P/ is nearly impossible to say on its own. It’s really just a plosion of air, so it sound like you’re imitating a champagne cork popping. Parents typically add a vowel, usually saying “puh” for P.

Then again, maybe whether kids perceive onsets/rimes or phonemes is less important than their having a sizable verbal short term memory in which to manipulate and consider these speech sounds as they are learning to read.

Melby-Lervåg et al. included 235 studies in their analysis and concluded that existing research suggests that all three—rime awareness, phoneme awareness, and size of verbal short-term memory—predict word reading but the largest effect is observed with phonemic awareness.  (In fact, the predictive value of verbal short-term memory is quite small.)

The second important conclusion from this review concerns causality. All of these studies in the meta-analysis are correlational. Hence, one interpretation is that phonemic awareness is related to word reading skills because phonemic awareness is necessary for that skill. However, an equally viable interpretation is that reading changes phonemic awareness, so the association is observed because more skilled readers have undergone greater change.

Melby-Lervåg et al. separately consider longitudinal studies that measure phonemic awareness when children are still quite young and have little reading experience. Then reading ability (and especially, the rate at which this ability grows) of these same children is then measured later. Phonemic awareness remains an excellent predictor of reading skill in these studies with a mean correlation of .43; reading could not have caused phonemic awareness, because phonemic awareness was measured before kids could read. (Rime awareness was also a significant predictor in this sort of study, but not as strong, mean correlation = .29). Coupled with other data (not included in the meta-analysis) showing a positive effect for phonemic awareness training, the evidence for a causal role of phonemic awareness in learning to read is growing quite strong.

Melby-Lervåg, M., Lyster, S-A H., & Hulme, C. (2012). Phonological skills and their role in learning to read: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 138,  322-352.

Title tells all.

Video here.

One strategy for thinking about interventions to boost kids success in school is to conduct the following sort of study. Step one:  measure lots of factors early in life, i.e., before kids start school. Step two: measure academic success after kids have been in school awhile (say, fourth grade). Then see which factors you measured early in life are associated with school success measured later.

Some factors are well-known, e.g., socio-economic status of the parents, and so you’d statistically remove those “usual suspects” first.

In 2007 Duncan and colleagues introduced a new method of analyzing this type of data, and they applied it to six sizable international data sets that followed kids from as early as birth to 3rd grade, focusing especially on reading and math achievement.  They concluded that early measures of math and reading, and measures of attention were significant predictors of later math and reading skills, but early social skills were not. Curiously, early math scores predicted later reading scores as well as early reading scores did.

Their conclusions, while not startling, attracted a lot of attention because the new method was deemed quite useful, and because it was applied meticulously to several large-scale datasets.

In 2010, another article was published using the same methodology, but with a startling result.

David Grissmer and his colleagues noted that three of the data sets had early measures of fine motor skills. They found that, after they statistically accounted for all of the factors that Duncan et al had examined, fine motor skills was and additional, strong predictor of student achievement.

I have to note that what the tests called “fine motor skills” strikes me as a bit odd.  Cognitive psychologists think of that as being tasks like buttoning a button, or picking something up with tweezers—i.e., requiring precise movements, usually of the fingers. But in these data sets it was tested with tasks like copying simple designs, or drawing a human figure. These are not solely motor tasks.

The fuzziness of exactly what the tasks mean may cloud the interpretation, but it doesn’t cloud the size of the effect—these tasks are a robust predictor of later math and reading achievement.

There’s plenty of speculation as to why this effect might work. Perhaps the measure of “fine motor skills” is really another way of measuring some aspect of attention. Perhaps it’s another way of measuring how well kids can understand and use space. Or the effect may be more direct; it’s commonly thought that the motor and cognitive domains are intertwined, and so practicing motor  tasks may aid cognition.

The big question: does this mean that practice of fine motor skills will boost academic achievement? Those studies are ongoing, and I hope to report on the results here before long.

Duncan, G. J., Dowsett, C. J., Claessens, A., Magnuson, K., Huston, A. C.,Klebanov, P., . . . Japel, C. (2007). School readiness and later achievement. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1428–1446.

Grissmer, D., Grimm, K., J., Aiyer, S. M., Murrah, W. M., & Steele, J. S. (2010). Fine Motor Skills and Attention: Primary Developmental Predictors of Later Achievement. Developmental Psychology, 46, 1008-1017.

     It's a funny thing about the use of new technologies in schools: it's not only seen as inevitable, it's often described as necessary because today's students are digital natives.
     But for at least some technologies, the evidence supporting that contention is weak.
     An article in Computers & Education by Woody, Daniel, & Baker (2010) replicated other studies in showing that college students preferred studying from traditional textbooks rather than etextbooks, and also reported no correlation between previous experience with ebooks and how much students liked etextbooks.
     Some technology boosters have suggested that previous findings of student indifference to etextbooks is due to their novelty--once students get used to them, the argument goes, they will like them. Woody et al. suggest that their finding casts doubt on this explanation.

Woody, W. D., Daniel, D. B. & Baker, C. A. (2010). E-books or textbooks: Students prefer textbooks. Computers & Education, 55, 945-948.