We need a new literacy to handle skim reading
In previous post we have dealt with the consequences of skipping reading (also called skin reading) – the new reading normality in the digital age – on content producers. We have tried to outline some characteristics of the content and its presentation to the reader that can facilitate this widespread new approach to a written text.
We now offer you the reflections of Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), on the cognitive, and above all social, consequences of the practice of jumping reading, especially in the field of learning and social behavior. These are important consequences that society at all levels should not ignore, dealing with them and seeking solutions that can welcome and manage these behaviours, against which, as we well know, there is no other possibility other than being able to understand them and address them.
The halving of the level of understanding
Jump reading (sometimes also called by the English term skimming), is a very fast reading process which consists in visually searching within a page for clues that help to get a summary idea of the contents.
This type of reading usually occurs at a much higher speed (around 700 wpm), compared to a normal reading done to fully understand a text (around 200-230 wpm), and in fact leads to very poor levels of understanding , especially if you are reading a text rich in informative content. Reading experts consider this practice risky, and therefore recommend using it only when understanding is not needed.
Speed reading courses teach techniques that consist mostly of orientation reading, and standard comprehension tests have shown that the level of understanding provided by these techniques is below 50% (Carver 1992). Furthermore, speed reading is even more limited than orientation reading, because it requires constant practice and leads those who use it to decrease their ability to extract details from a text and to decrease their ability to judge their level of understanding.
Let's try to look around on our next plane trip. The iPad is the new teat for babies and toddlers. School children read stories on smartphones; older kids don't read at all, because they prefer video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or browse a flotilla of emails and news that sails across their screens. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible transformation is taking place, which changes the scenario in this representation: the neuronal circuitry, at the basis of the brain's ability to read, is assuming a new arrangement. It's a shift with implications for how we inform and educate ourselves through books and the written word. It affects everyone, from pre-reading childhood to adulthood.
The consequences on the work of the brain
As work in the neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of the ability to read and write necessitated new circuitry being rewired into our species' brains more than 6000 years ago. That circuit has evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, such as the number of goats in one's herd, to the complex mechanism of reading and abstract and creative thinking. My research describes how the reading brain makes possible the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning and inference; perspective vision and empathy; critical analysis and insight generation. Scientific research taking place in many parts of the world now warns us that each of these essential "deep reading" processes may be threatened as we move into the mode of reading based on digital text conveyed through an Internet-connected screen.
This is not a simple binary equation of print vs digital reading and technological innovation. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has written, we err as a society when we innovate and ignore what we disrupt or marginalize. In this moment of transition from print to digital cultures, society has to deal with what is being lost in the specialized reading circuit, what children and older students are not developing. It is important to address what we can do about this.
We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to humans through a genetic blueprint such as vision or language: reading needs an environment to develop. Furthermore, it will tend to adapt to the needs of that environment – to the different writing systems and characteristics of the medium used. If the dominant medium favors fast processes, oriented towards multitasking and suitable for large volumes of information, such as the current digital medium, the reading circuit will also be deeply affected. As UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield writes, the result is that less attention and time will be allocated to slower, more challenging deep reading processes, such as inference, critical analysis, and empathy, all of which are indispensable for learning at any age.
The experience of educators
The experience of educators and researchers in psychology and the human sciences confirms this. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson says that many college students actively avoid 21st and 20th century classic literature because they no longer have the patience to read long, dense, and difficult texts. More than students' cognitive impatience, we should be more concerned with what underlies this, i.e. the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to understand the complexity of thinking and arguments present in the most demanding texts, both in the literary, scientific, legal and finally political fields.
Multiple studies show that screen reading can cause a variety of lasting and worrying effects on reading comprehension in high school and college students. In Stavanger, Norway, psychologist Anne Mangen and her colleagues studied how high school students understand the same material in different ways. Mangen's research team asked the readers of a short story some questions, Jenny, Mon Amour, whose storyline contained a certain hold on them (a naughty romance); half of the students read it on a Kindle, the other half in paperback. The results indicated that the students who read the printed version had a superior comprehension compared to their peers who read it on video, in particular they showed a greater ability to reconstruct the details and the plot in the order of the succession of events.
Ziming Liu of San Jose State University has conducted a series of studies showing that the "new norm" of reading is based on skimming, scanning for keywords and speedy navigation of text. Many readers now use an "F or Z pattern" to create a visual hierarchy on the page as they read: they sample the first and last lines, then draw a diagonal line joining the two lines, forming a zeta, and then move along this line. When the brain skims content in this way, it reduces the time allotted to deep reading processes. In other words, we don't have time to grasp the complexity, to understand the feelings described, to perceive the beauty and to elaborate original thoughts.
Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have highlighted another dimension: physicality. The team of Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen found that the sense of touch on the printed page adds an important redundancy to information, a sort of "geometry" for words and a spatial "truth" of text. As Piper notes, humans need to know where they are in time and space, which allows them to return to a physical context and learn from its reexamination – a process he calls the "technology of recurrence." The importance of recurrence for young readers and also for the not so young offers the possibility of moving back and forth to verify and evaluate one's understanding of a text. The question, then, is: what happens to comprehension when a young person explores a text on a screen whose lack of spatiality discourages "back reading"?
The collateral damage of skipping reading
American media researchers such as Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine, American University linguist Naomi Baron, and cognitive scientist Tami Katzir of the University of Haifa have examined the effects of different media on young people in particular. Katzir's research has shown that the negative effects of screen reading can appear between the ages of 9 and 11 – with implications not only for learning, but also for the growth of empathy.
The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading processes may become the unintended "collateral damage" of the new digital culture is not a simple matter of print vs screen. It's about how we all started reading in any medium and how the medium can change not only what we read, but also the reasons why we read. And it's not just about the younger ones. The sneaky atrophy of critical analysis and empathy that tends to assert itself concerns everyone. It affects our ability to orient ourselves in the presence of a constant bombardment of information. It encourages a retreat into the more familiar silos of often unverified information that is unresearched and unverified, thus leaving us vulnerable to false information and demagoguery.
There's an old rule in neuroscience that doesn't change with age: without the use of you lose the ability to use. It is a very important principle when applied to critical thinking in the brain circuitry that drives reading because it regulates the ability to choose. The story of the change in the reading brain is known. We possess both the science and technology to identify and correct changes in the way we read before they cement. If we understand exactly what we are losing, alongside the extraordinary potential that the digital world offers us, we can manage these processes.
What can you do?
We need to "cultivate" a new kind of cerebral approach to reading: a "bi-literate" approach capable of preserving and developing the deepest forms of thinking in relation to the use of digital and traditional media. The stakes are great: it concerns the ability of citizens in a vibrant democracy to know how to evaluate the various perspectives and to discern the truth from the false. It is about the ability of future generations to appreciate and create beauty. It is also about the ability to reach beyond the current abundance of information to attain the knowledge and wisdom needed to sustain a just and healthy society.
