From the Journals :: “Reading” Online

Recent studies out of the University of Connecticut suggest there is no correlation between a student’s offline and online reading skills. The study defends the notion that “few, if any, of these new literacies have found their way into the classroom.  Indeed, many seem to be resisted overtly, by deliberate educational policies, or covertly, by educators who sometimes are not nearly as literate with the Internet as the students they teach.” Researchers studied the reading strategies of both strong and struggling readers using the state’s reading exam as a measure (even monitoring students’ eye movement with a tiny camera). The study examines the idea that students who perform well on traditional paper-based reading tests would perform well on an online reading assessment as well.  The authors say this supposed correlation between online and offline reading underlies policymakers’ own suppositions when creating literacy benchmarks.  Reading, after all, is reading—isn’t it?

Reading is not reading.  The research finds there to be zero correlation between students’ offline and online reading abilities.

There are limits to the study, of course. Firstly, both tests assessed efferent readings. There was a specific task to be done; there was information to find. The notion of reading as aesthetic or pleasurable was unimportant in the study. Secondly, students are assigned a problem to solve online. They are assigned.  The researchers don’t explore the assigned nature of the task enough.  Students’ online lives don’t tend to include mandated assignments. By institutionally requiring such assignments, you could argue that students’ online behavior will be altered.  They aren’t acting of their own volition.  Together, these two limitations raise questions for English teachers, some new and some old.

Even before Louise Rosenblatt’s work raised question of efferent and aesthetic readings in literature classrooms, the reason to read literature was a topic for debate. (These discussions continue today in our own Ning community.) Without trying to answer the question definitively, it might be safe to say that reading only for information—which this research privileges–is insufficient. If information reading is all students need, there seems little reason to read literature or to unpack film or to write anything other than information-laden (and often formulaic) essays.

What’s more, much has been written about the unique nature of adolescents’ new literacies practices. Even this study supports the idea that those practices are dramatically different from print-based ones. Not only do students read in nonlinear ways–their eyes likely to zigzag around the screen rather than moving left to right like the hammers of a typewriter–but they read and write other modes: video, music, html code, to name a few. It’s worth noting, too, that the texts read and written online are often done within a social network. Online, audience matters in ways we teachers might struggle to understand. Online texts are public, social, and often collegial.

In the end, the study does emphasize how distinct online and offline reading are.  Its limits seem to be its definition of what constitutes reading, not to mention the types of texts worth reading in schools.

For more information, see:

- Leu, D. J., Zawilinski, L., Castek, J., Banerjee, M., Housand, B. C., Liu, Y., et al. (2007). What is new about the new literacies of online reading comprehension? In L. S. Rush, A. J. Eakle & A. Berger (Eds.), Secondary school literacy: What research reveals for classroom practive. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE.

- The UConn New Literacies Research Team

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