Why Reading Feels Different Now

In December 2017, Dr. Monica Burns shared this excerpt from Taming the Wild Text, written with Pam Allyn, on how students now read across print and screens. The section below, added in 2026, looks at what research since then says about print vs digital reading and what teachers can do with it.

Literacy strategies for today’s readers Hear more from Dr. Monica Burns and other innovative analysts, thought leaders, and educators at the 2018 Future of Education Technology Conference (FETC), January 23-26 in Orlando, Florida. Learn more here.

by Dr. Monica Burns

What does reading look like for students in today’s classroom? How can we find the balance between print and digital reading materials and support students as readers? In this excerpt from Taming the Wild Text: Literacy Strategies for Today’s Readers, FETC featured speaker Dr. Monica Burns and her co-author Pam Allyn share strategies for educators navigating the world of digital and print text.

Why Reading Feels Different Now

It is a new era for reading. Though the child in bed with a flashlight may seem like a quaint image from the past, the idea of illuminated reading under the covers can be as true today as it was yesterday. Today’s child can become immersed in the world of reading, but the light of the story glowing in the late corners of the evening may come from a screen rather than a flashlight. The reader of today is reading but not always one book at a time. This reader is athletic: jumping from idea to idea, genre to genre. He or she is reading across many platforms, many types of text, from visual to print, from moving images to primary source photographs. However, the child with the flashlight is still within us and within our children. The print book is not gone, and the technology has not taken over. Rather, the world is becoming a truly blended one. Reading is a lasting innovation in many forms. It sustains us, guides us, and makes us whole.

Many books have proposed that reading on paper is out of style, that adults are the “digital immigrants” and students are the “digital natives,” that teachers and parents have to catch up to them, and that the only way kids will keep reading is if they are flooded with tablets and other technologies in classrooms.

But just when many thought the end of print was near, in 2016, sales of children’s books exceeded sales of adult books. Overall, sales of print books are climbing, and new independent bookstores are opening at a relatively steady clip. The American Booksellers Association (ABA) reported that 60 independent bookstores opened in 31 states and the District of Columbia in 2015, besting 2016’s total by one. And so, in the midst of the new era, readers are becoming more comfortable using many platforms, and students are growing up in a world that will have more options than ever. So it is not an “either/or” world of reading; it is a world of open possibility for countless kinds of reading to exist for children. Teachers and parents must strive to develop children who can tame the wild text anywhere, in any form.

What Readers Need

Reading has become wilder than ever. The world now is full of many types of text emerging through new technologies. Grammar is changing; devices are changing—even fonts are changing and evolving. It is a very exciting time to be a reader. But a reader’s needs, like that child under the covers with the flashlight, don’t change that much. All readers need a choice in the text that they read, access to a wide variety of texts, time to read and mentor readers who guide and inspire them. Readers need an environment in which it feels safe to take risks, where they receive affirmative feedback regarding reading progress, the opportunity to have an ever-changing identity as a reader, and a community of supportive and encouraging fellow readers.

There are key ways in which teachers can tame the wildness of all the texts children are reading. By providing structures and strategies that support the growing reader, teachers can launch their students into the world of 21st-century reading. Today’s readers must explore text on every platform and in every genre, to struggle with text, to break through to new ideas when reading text, and to become the kind of fearless reader who tames the wild text.

Dr. Monica Burns will be a featured presenter at the 2018 FETC conference

Editor’s note (2026): The conference described above has taken place.

Print vs digital reading: what the research says about comprehension

Print vs digital reading is the question Monica Burns and Pam Allyn raise above when they ask how educators can find a balance between print and digital materials. Their answer is that reading now means using both, and that teachers and parents should help children read well in any form. Research on how well students understand text in each medium has grown since 2017, and it gives some specific findings that a teacher can use alongside that advice.

What earlier research found

A 2018 meta-analysis by Yiren Kong, Young Sik Seo and Ling Zhai, covering 17 studies, in Computers and Education, which pooled results from earlier experiments, found that reading on paper was better than reading on screen for comprehension. It found no significant difference in reading speed. The moderators the authors tested were not significant at the conventional level, and the gap in comprehension seemed to shrink when studies before and after 2013 were compared, although the authors did not claim that as a firm result. The authors recommended that future meta-analyses include newer studies. The details are in the study’s abstract.

What the newer handheld-device research found

Much of the earlier research used computers, and a tablet gives a reading experience closer to a book. A 2024 article in the Journal of Educational Psychology (volume 116, pages 153-172) by Ladislao Salmerón and colleagues, available as a preprint from the University of Valencia, addressed this by running two meta-analyses of reading on handheld devices. One covered 38 studies that compared different groups of readers (an effect of g = -0.113), and the other covered 21 studies in which the same readers used both media (g = -0.103). Both found a small but significant advantage for print on comprehension. In plain terms, the average difference was about a tenth of a standard deviation, which is small, and an individual student may do better on a screen.

The authors also found that, in some analyses, the advantage for print was larger for undergraduates than for primary and secondary school students, and larger when participants were assessed individually than in groups. They conclude that schools should continue to foster print reading while developing effective ways to use handheld devices for reading, and they state that print can be considered an efficient way to promote comprehension.

What this means for classroom decisions

Because the differences are small and measured on average, the findings do not argue against screens in schools. They do suggest that the medium is one of several factors a teacher can adjust. Some practical steps follow from the research and from Burns and Allyn’s list of what readers need:

• Ask what the reading task is. For a long, sustained text where understanding is the goal, offer print as an option or the default, as the 2024 authors’ conclusion suggests.
• Use screens where they add something print cannot, such as a mix of text, images and primary source photographs that Burns and Allyn describe.
• Keep choice, access to many kinds of text, and time to read, which the excerpt names as needs of all readers, regardless of medium.
• Give students practice with both media, so that they learn to read carefully in each. Burns and Allyn describe the goal as a reader who can handle text anywhere, in any form.
• Check results locally. A school can compare its own students’ comprehension on the same passage in print and on a device before making a policy for a grade.

The excerpt above also cites children’s book sales and the number of new independent bookstores in 2015 and 2016 as evidence that print remains in use. Those are market figures and were not checked here; the comprehension research above is a more direct basis for classroom decisions. The two meta-analyses came from different research groups, and the 2024 article was read in its preprint form, so readers who need exact figures should consult the published version.

Further Reading

1. LA Times – California isn’t doing enough to teach kids how to read, lawsuit says
2. CNN – How to get your kid to be a fanatic reader
3. BBC – Northern Ireland and England schools in global top 10 for reading

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