Reading on a screen and reading on paper produce different results on tests, and the difference is small but consistent.
Paper wins for text under time pressure and draws for .
The size of the effect has fallen as screens have improved, which suggests part of it was never about the medium.
What remains appears to concern behaviour rather than .
Readers on a screen report higher confidence in their and score lower on it.
That combination is the signature of a shallower process, and it disappears when readers are told to slow down.
The medium seems to cue a mode of reading learned elsewhere, on shorter and less demanding material.
is a plausible part of the mechanism and is easy to test.
A page has a stable spatial layout, and readers use position on a page to remember where an argument was.
Continuous scrolling removes that map and measurably reduces of structure.
digital formats recover part of the difference, which is a design finding rather than a psychological one.
Annotation is the practice that separates a student who retains from one who does not, on either medium.
Digital tools make annotation easier and make it less frequent, which sounds contradictory and is not.
Highlighting with a click costs nothing, so it is done and carries no information afterwards.
A pencil is slow enough to require a decision about what matters.
Policies that banned screens in classrooms were adopted faster than the evidence justified.
The effect sizes involved would not survive a change in teaching quality of any magnitude.
Teaching students how to read a long argument matters more than deciding what it is printed on.