{"id":29,"date":"2026-11-05T05:21:53","date_gmt":"2026-11-05T05:21:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/?p=29"},"modified":"2026-11-05T05:21:53","modified_gmt":"2026-11-05T05:21:53","slug":"how-to-teach-kids-who-flip-between-book-and-screen-philsugar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/?p=29","title":{"rendered":"How to teach kids who flip between book and screen | PhilSugar"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linus Merryman spends about an hour a day on his laptop at his elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, mostly working on foundational reading skills like phonics and spelling. He opens the reading app Lexia with ease, clicking straight through to lessons chosen specifically to address his reading needs. This week Linus, who\u2019s in second grade, is working on \u201cchunking,\u201d finding the places where words are broken into syllables. The word
\nchimpanzee
\nappears on the screen in large letters, and Linus uses his mouse pad to grab cartoon Roman columns and slip them into the spaces between letters, like little dividers, where he thinks the syllable breaks should be. The app reads his guesses back to him\u2014\u201cchim-pan-zee.\u201d He gets it right.
\nAfter practicing these foundational skills on the computer, he and his classmates close their laptops and head to the rug, each with a print copy of their class reader,
\nI Have a Dream
\n, a picture book featuring the text of Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s speech. Students follow along in their books as the teacher reads aloud, occasionally stopping sponsor dating site Philippines<\/a> so they can ask questions and point out things they notice, like how the speech is written in the first person.
\nLinus\u2019s mom, Erin Merryman, an early reading interventionist at another Nashville school, initially worried about how well her son would learn to read in a classroom that made so much use of computers. He has been diagnosed with the learning disability dyslexia, and Merryman knows from her training that dyslexic students often need sensory input to sugar dating matching Philippines<\/a> learn how sounds are connected to letters. Close oversight from a teacher helps them as well. But since his reading has vastly improved this year, she\u2019s adjusted her view.
\n\u201cI think a lot of what the app is doing is very good, very thorough,\u201d Merryman says. \u201cI\u2019m surprised by how effective it is.\u201d
\nLike Merryman, a growing group of experts and educators are trying to figure out what the relationship should be between digital technology and reading instruction. Both reading and digital tech are world-expanding human inventions, and laptops and smartphones have arguably given humans unending opportunities to read more; you can access pretty much anything in print within a few seconds. In terms of \u201craw words,\u201d the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham
\nhas said
\n, kids read more now than they did a decade ago. But many reading experts suspect that the technology may also be changing
\nhow
\nthey read\u2014that reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on the page.
\nResearchers who study young readers\u2019 brains and behaviors are eager to understand exactly where tech serves kids\u2019 progress in reading and where it may stand in the way. The questions are still so new that the answers are often unclear. Since the covid-19 pandemic closed schools in 2020, nearly all students have been organizing their learning around a school-issued laptop or tablet. But educators who are more dependent than ever on digital tech to aid learning in general often have little or no guidance on how to balance screens and paper books for beginning readers accustomed to toggling between the two. In a lot of ways, each teacher is winging it.
\nFiguring out how best to serve these young \u201cbiliterate brains\u201d is crucial, cognitive scientists say\u2014not just to the future of reading instruction, but to the future of thought itself. Digital technology has transformed how we get knowledge in ways that will advance and forever alter our species. But at the individual level, the same technology threatens to disrupt, even diminish, the kind of slow, careful learning acquired from reading books and other forms of print.
\nThose seemingly contradictory truths underline the question of how we should go about teaching children to read in the 21st century, says neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, author of
\nReader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in how sugar dating works in Philippines<\/a> a Digital World
\n. Wolf, the first to use the term \u201cbiliterate brain,\u201d is busy researching the relative merits of screen- and page-based approaches, adopting in the meantime a stance of what she calls \u201clearned ignorance\u201d: deeply investigating both positions and then stepping outside them to evaluate all the evidence and shake out the findings.
\nResearchers who study young readers\u2019 brains and behaviors are eager to understand exactly where tech serves kids\u2019 progress in reading and where it may stand in the way.
\n\u201cKnowledge has not progressed to the point where we have the kind of evidence I feel we need,\u201d Wolf says. \u201cWhat do the affordances of each medium\u2014screens vs. print\u2014do to the reading brain\u2019s use of its full circuitry? The answers are not all in.\u201d
\nBut, she continues, \u201cour understanding is that print advantages slower, deeper processes in the reading brain. You can use a screen to complement, BGC sugar daddy<\/a> to teach certain skills, but you don\u2019t want a child to learn to read through a screen.\u201d
\nWhich is best for comprehension, screens or books?
\nOnce children have learned to decode words, research on how they comprehend texts encountered on screens and paper gets a little more decisive. Experts say that young readers need to be reading alongside adults\u2014getting feedback, asking questions, and looking at pictures together. All this helps them build the vocabulary and knowledge to understand what they\u2019re reading. Screens often do a poor job of replicating this human-to-human interaction, and scientists like Wolf say that the \u201creading circuits\u201d in children\u2019s brains develop differently when the young learners are glued to a screen.
\nStudies on the inner workings of the brain confirm the idea that human interaction helps develop beginning readers\u2019 capacity for understanding. But they suggest that reading paper books is associated with that progress, too. In
\none study
\n, researchers found that three- and four-year-old children had more activation in language regions of the brain when they read a book with an adult like a parent than when they listened to an audiobook or read from a digital app. When they read on an iPad, activation was lowest of all. In
\nanother
\nstudy, MRI scans of eight- to 12-year-olds showed stronger reading circuits in those who spent more time reading paper books than those who spent their time on screens.
\nFor older students,
\nsignificant research
\nshows that comprehension suffers when they read from a screen. A large 2019 meta-analysis of 33 different studies showed that students understood more informational text when they read on paper. A
\nstudy
\nby the Reboot Foundation, evaluating thousands of students across 90 countries including the US, found that fourth graders who used tablets in nearly all their classes scored 14 points lower on a reading test than students who never used them. Researchers called the score gap \u201cequivalent to a full grade level\u201d of learning. Students who used technology \u201cevery day for several hours during the school day\u201d underperformed the most, while the gap shrank or even disappeared when students spent less than half an hour a day on a laptop or tablet.
\nWhy do students understand more of what they read when it\u2019s in a book? Researchers aren\u2019t entirely sure. Part of the issue is that \u201conline reading complicates the comprehension process a millionfold,\u201d said Julie Coiro, a researcher at the University of Rhode Island, in a
\n2018 interview
\n. Coiro described the process of a child reading on a website that often contains images, links and videos within the body of the text and make the process of comprehension harder: \u201cIt used to be that there was a pre-reading, the reading itself, and the evaluation at the end of your chapter or at the end of a book,\u201d Coiro said. \u201cNow [on the Internet] that process happens repeatedly in about 4 seconds: I choose a link. I decide whether I want to be here\/I don\u2019t want to be here, and then, where should I go next?\u201d
\nCoiro\u2019s more recent research shows that explicit teaching on how to handle the more complicated reading landscape\u2014like when to click on links, and when to ignore them\u2014helps improve comprehension. But even in other reading experiments where students weren\u2019t allowed to browse the web or click on embedded links, they still performed worse.
\nVirginia Clinton-Lisell, the author of the 2019 meta-analysis, hypothesized that
\noverconfidence
\ncould be another aspect of the problem. In many of the studies, students who read from avoid fake sugar babies<\/a> a laptop seemed to overestimate their comprehension skills compared with those reading the paper books, perhaps causing them to put in less effort while reading.
\nStudents self-report learning more and having a better reading experience when they read paper books. Linguist Naomi Baron, author of
\nHow We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio
\n, says that when she interviews students about their perceptions, they often say reading from a book is \u201creal reading.\u201d They like the feel of the book in their hands, and they find it easier to go back to things they\u2019ve already read than when they are reading from a screen. While they might prefer digital formats for reasons of convenience or cost, they sense they have greater concentration while reading print.
\nBut Baron says school districts and educators often aren\u2019t aware of the strong research connecting books to better comprehension or confirming
\nstudent preferences
\nfor print. Baron\u2019s research dealt with college students, but last year a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) of 15-year-olds in 30 countries showed that students who preferred reading on paper scored 49 points higher, on average, on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)\u2014and the
\nstudy hinted
\nat an association between reading paper books and liking to read.
\nBaron also thinks there should be more practical attention paid to developing pedagogical approaches that explicitly teach the slower, more focused habits of print reading, and then help students transfer those skills to the screen. Reinforcing those habits would be helpful even for people who usually read books, because someone reading a book can get distracted too\u2014especially if a phone is nearby.
\nThe use of d
\nigital books and textbooks
\nexploded during the pandemic, and it may be only a matter of time before all educational publishing moves online. So it\u2019s all the more important to keep making digital reading better for students, says literacy educator Tim Shanahan. Instead of trying to make the digital technology more like a book, Shanahan has written, \u201c[engineers] need to think about how to produce better digital tools. Tech environments can alter reading behavior, so technological scaffolding could be used to slow us down or to move around a text more productively.\u201d In the future, students might read about history or science from something like a \u201c
\ntap essay
\n,\u201d where words, sentences, and images are revealed only when a reader is ready and taps the screen to move on to the next piece of text. Or maybe their reading material will look more like a New York Times digital article, in which text, images, video, and sound clips are spaced out and blended together in different ways.
\nHooked on computer phonics
\nAbout
\ntwo-thirds of American schoolchildren
\ncan\u2019t read at grade level. At least partly to blame is a widespread method of reading instruction that dominated classrooms for 40 years but was not based on scientific evidence sugar baby warning signs<\/a> about how the brain learns to read: \u201cbalanced literacy,\u201d and its close cousin \u201cwhole language,\u201d deemphasized explicit instruction in reading\u2019s foundational skills, leaving many children struggling. But over the last several years, a new method strongly focused on these foundational skills, often referred to as the \u201c
\nscience of reading,\u201d
\nhas brought sweeping changes to the US education system. Based on decades of scientific evidence, the \u201cscience of reading\u201d approach is organized into five areas: phonemic awareness (learning all the sounds of the English language), phonics (learning how those sounds are attached to letters), vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency.
\nLearn-to-read apps and digital platforms have the potential to teach some of these foundational skills efficiently. They\u2019re especially well suited to phonemic awareness and phonics, making learning letters and sound combinations a game and reinforcing the skills with practice. Lexia, arguably the most widespread digital platform devoted to the science of reading, teaches basic and complex foundational reading skills, like letter-sound blends and spelling rules, using responsive technology. When learning a specific skill, such as figuring out how to read words like
\nmeal
\nand
\nseam
\nwith the \u201cea\u201d vowel combination in the middle, students can\u2019t move on until they\u2019ve mastered it.
\nDigital platforms can reinforce certain specific reading skills, but it\u2019s the teacher who is constantly monitoring the student\u2019s progress and adjusting the instruction as needed.
\nA new wave of predictive reading platforms goes one step further. Companies like Microsoft and
\nSoapBoxLabs
\nare envisioning a world where students can learn to read entirely via computer. Using AI speech recognition technology, the companies claim, these digital platforms can listen closely to a student reading. Then they can identify trouble spots and offer help accordingly.
\nAs digital tech for learning to read spreads into schools\u2014Lexia alone serves more than 3,000 school districts\u2014some reading experts are wary. Research on its efficacy is limited. While some see technology playing a useful role in reading-related functions like assessing students and even training teachers, many say that when it comes to actually doing the teaching, humans are superior.
\nDigital platforms can reinforce certain specific reading skills, explains Heidi Beverine-Curry, chief academic officer of the teacher training and research organization The Reading League, but it\u2019s the teacher who is constantly monitoring the student\u2019s progress and adjusting the instruction as needed.
\nFaith Borkowsky, founder of High Five Literacy, a tutoring and consultancy service in Plainview, New York, is not bothered by reading instruction apps per se. \u201cIf it happens to be a computer program where a few kids could go on and practice a certain skill, I\u2019d be all for it, if it aligns with what we are doing,\u201d she says. But often that\u2019s not how it plays out in classrooms.
\nIn the Long Island schools Borkowsky works with, it\u2019s more likely that students do more reading work on laptops because schools purchased expensive technology and feel pressured to use it\u2014even if it\u2019s not always the best way to teach reading skills. \u201cWhat I\u2019ve seen in schools is they have a program, and they say, \u2018Well, we bought it\u2014now we have to use it.\u2019 Districts find it hard to turn back after purchasing expensive programs and materials,\u201d she says.
\nSome platforms are working to bridge the gap between online and in-person instruction. Ignite! Reading, an intensive tutoring program launched sugar daddy na may allowance<\/a> after the pandemic closed schools, teaches foundational reading skills like phonemic awareness and phonics through a videoconferencing platform, where reading tutors and students can see and hear one another.
\nIgnite\u2019s instruction attempts to blend the benefits of digital tech and human interaction. In one tutoring session, a first grader named Brittany in Indianapolis, Indiana, sounded out simple words, prompted by her reading tutor, whom she could safe first meeting sugar dating<\/a> see through her laptop\u2019s camera. Brittany read \u201cmap\u201d and \u201ccup,\u201d tapping the whiteboard in her hand each time she made a sound: three sounds in a word, three taps. At the same time, a digital whiteboard on her laptop screen also tapped out the sounds: one, two, three. As Brittany sounded out each word, the tutor watched the child\u2019s mouth through the computer\u2019s camera, giving adjustments along the way.
\nIgnite cofounder and CEO Jessica Sliwerski says she\u2019s building an army of remote reading tutors to assist teachers in helping kids catch up after the pandemic years. Students get 15-\u00adminute sessions during the school day, and when sessions are over, tutors get coaching on how to make the short bursts more effective.
\nSliwerski believes technology can be incredibly useful for giving more students one-on-one attention. \u201cWe are taking a different approach to the technology,\u201d she says. \u201cWe are centering the child on a human who is highly trained and accountable. That\u2019s the core of it, and there\u2019s not really anything tech about that.\u201d
\nPreserving deep reading
\nOnce students can decode words and comprehend their meaning, the real work of reading begins. This is what Wolf calls \u201cdeep reading,\u201d a specific set of cognitive and affective processes in which readers are able to take in whole chunks of text at a time, make predictions about what comes next, and develop lightning-fast perception. These interactive processes feed each other in the brain, accelerating understanding.
\nBut since the vast majority of the reading that today\u2019s young people do\u2014let\u2019s face it, the majority that we all do\u2014is skimming sugar baby tuition support<\/a> an online article, a Facebook post, or a text from a friend while hopping from one tab to another, deep reading as a cognitive process is at risk. If today\u2019s kids read only from screens, Wolf says, they may never learn deep reading in the first place\u2014that elaboration of the brain\u2019s reading circuit may never be built. Screen reading may \u201cdisrupt and diminish the very powers that it is supposed to advance.\u201d
\n\u201cWe are amassing data that indicates there are changes in the reading brain that diminish its ability to use its most important, sophisticated processes over time when the screen dominates,\u201d Wolf says. Deep reading is something that came naturally to many readers before digital tech and personal computers, when they had lots of time to spend doing nothing but reading a book; but it can\u2019t be assumed that today\u2019s young readers, with their biliterate brains, will automatically learn the process.
\nSome educators are paying more attention to how to help students begin to learn deep reading. Doug Lemov, a charter school founder who now trains teachers full time with his \u201cTeach Like a Champion\u201d books and courses, is acutely concerned that many middle and high school students no longer appear to have the attention span to concentrate on a text for long periods of time. So he encourages the teachers he trains to adopt \u201clow-tech, high-text environments\u201d inside their classrooms, with paper books, pencils, and paper. In such a setting, students slowly build up their attention spans by doing nothing but reading a book or scratching out a piece of writing, even if that means beginning with just a few minutes at a time.
\n\u201cBuild on that until they can go for 20 minutes, either in a group or individually\u2014just reading the text, sustaining their attention and maintaining focus,\u201d Lemov says. \u201cWriting does the same thing: it improves the focus and attention that students will need to do deep reading.\u201d
\nIt\u2019s possible, of course, that kids\u2019 attention spans haven\u2019t actually changed that much with the advent of digital technology. Instead, argues Willingham, the cognitive scientist, in his book
\nThe Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to How the Mind Reads
\n, it\u2019s their expectations for entertainment that have changed. \u201cThe consequence of long-term experience with digital technologies is not an inability to sustain free vs paid sugar dating sites Philippines<\/a> attention. It\u2019s impatience with boredom,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt\u2019s an expectation that I should always have something interesting to listen to, watch, or read, and that creating an interesting experience should require little effort.\u201d Deep reading, on the other hand, requires \u201ccognitive patience\u201d\u2014an entirely different set of skills in which kids often have to put in great effort for a payoff that is sometimes many pages down the road.
\nYet in Wolf\u2019s view, getting rid of all reading tech would be as ill-advised as relying on it exclusively. Instead, she\u2019s hoping to spur a conversation about balance, gathering evidence about which ways of using digital technology work best for diverse learners and for different age groups\u2014information that could help districts and teachers guide the decisions they make about teaching reading. A five- to 10-year-old child who is learning to read has different needs from a 12-year-old, or from a high schooler whose smartphone is loaded with five social media apps. Young children just beginning to build their reading circuit benefit most from books and human interaction. Older kids can cultivate the \u201cdigital wisdom\u201d to make smarter choices while working on developing the ability to toggle effortlessly between print and digital worlds.
\nSome kids, though, may be tired of all that toggling. Matt Ryan, a high school English teacher in Attleboro, Massachusetts, doesn\u2019t allow any e-books in his class\u2014when he assigns a novel, it\u2019s paper only. Not only does he not get any pushback, he says, but he senses students are somewhat relieved.
\n\u201cDistractions are a very real issue, so reading on a device will not be effective for most of them,\u201d Ryan says. \u201cMy sense is that so much of what they do is on a device\u2014they welcome something off of it.\u201d
\nHolly Korbey is an education and parenting journalist and author of
\nBuilding Better Citizens: A New Civics Education for All
\n.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Linus Merryman spends about an hour a day on his laptop at his elementary school in Nashville, Tennessee, mostly working on foundational reading skills like phonics and spelling. He opens the reading app Lexia with ease, clicking straight through to lessons chosen specifically to address his reading needs. This week Linus, who\u2019s in second grade,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"solace_meta_sidebar":"","solace_meta_container":"","solace_meta_enable_content_width":"","solace_meta_content_width":0,"solace_meta_title_alignment":"","solace_meta_author_avatar":"","solace_post_elements_order":"","solace_meta_disable_header":"","solace_meta_disable_footer":"","solace_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/32"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/philisharestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}