From the article:
In
2009, California passed a law requiring that all college textbooks be available in electronic form by 2020; in
2011, Florida lawmakers passed legislation requiring public schools to convert their textbooks to digital versions.
I don't take exception with CA's legislation (though I don't know why a law needed to be passed for it); however, were I a FL resident with kids in school there, I'd object to it's law. I explained the reasons why in
post 4, but the article identifies yet another excellent reason why:
[T]here's no "one medium fits all" approach.
Students said they preferred and performed better when reading on screens. But their actual performance tended to suffer...when it came to specific questions, comprehension was significantly better when participants read printed texts.
And therein is found yet another illustration of the dichotomy between perception and reality. One can only hope that the researchers and/or teachers disabused the students of their misconceptions about themselves and their performance by sharing with them the results of the study. Doing so would be among the most palpable ways to teach kids about the value of the saying "trust, but verify," not only when it comes to other people's assertions and beliefs, but also and most importantly, with regard to one's own. After all, "trust, but verify" is at the very heart of every discipline taught in school.
Thinking about the matter as an adult who reads a lot and, these days, must thus read a lot of digital content, I can say I strongly prefer digital content; however, that preference derives from the conveniences pertaining to finding linkages and specific passages in the text. There is no Ctrl-F feature for hard-copy materials.
To be sure, however, when it comes to reading content that has footnotes and endnotes (most of what I read does), I prefer a hard-copy to a digital copy because scrolling to the note causes a larger mental loss of place, as it were, than does glancing to the bottom of the page or dog-earing a page and flipping to the end. For documents that are particularly important for me to read quickly and completely, however, I deal with that by printing the document for the first read of it.
But I'm an adult. I'll figure out ways to overcome the comprehension and convenience challenges digital content presents. I will because I have to; it's part of the burden of responsibility one faces as an adult. In contrast, kids, I think, are less innovative, motivated, committed, intrepid...something....Most of them are quite content to encounter an obstacle or inconvenience and simply decide and decide to have "Sam Nunberg" moment. That is to say, they'll decide something akin to "geez, this takes too much time and effort, and I don't wanna do it; so I'm not going to."
Insofar as kids are generally predisposed to varying manifestations of apathy, whatever educators can do that dissuades from doing so is good thing. If that means making sure that texts are available in hard-copy, well, then that's one of the things educators (school systems) must do. After all, a key goal of the educational process is to disabuse kids of their will to be apathetic about anything whereof their langor may contribute detrimentally to their unsuccessfulness as adults.
