College Student Academic Online Reading: A Review of the Current Literature

Abstract

Having taught to college students for 27 years is amone the hiehliehts of my life. I loved learning about theory and practice; I loved teaching students how to read successfully for college courses; and I loved applying what I learned from colleagues. Durine those years, teaching colleee students how to read online was not an issue. My colleagues and I did instruct students on evaluating websites and using digital library resources, but teaching how to read academic text online was only beginning to be necessary.Now, however, teaching college students how to read online effectively is an important area of concern. Libraries have become digitized with online articles and e-books; e-textbooks are available and used; and instructors routinely assign online articles of some length. It is critical that instructors who teach at the college level understand the theory and practice of academic online reading. The reality of this need became apparent when I listened to a presentation about college students' preferences of paper versus screen (Hamer & McGrath, 2010) at the College Reading and Learning Association's conference in Salt Lake City. During the session, attendees discussed ramifications of the presenters' research, but they also clearly wanted strategies for students. They needed those strategies to take back to their classrooms. I decided then and there to see what the literature says about college student online reading.What follows is a review of the literature on college student online for academic purposes. The review includes an explanation of important terms used in the field; studies of student online preferences, comprehension, and strategies; and problems with online for students. It does not include a critique of the studies mentioned or research earlier than 2003.MethodAfter browsing the literature, I made a grid with a list of keyword sets that came up most often and the databases that seemed to give the most results. I searched each database with every set. The databases were Academic Search Premier, Applied Science and Technology, ERIC, Education Abstracts, ScienceDirect [sic], and Wilson Select Plus. The keyword sets that I used were (a) online + college, (b) transliteracies + college, (c) digital literacy + college + student, (d) information literacy + colleee + reading, (G] colleee + online readme + sender Cf) e-readine + colleee, and fsf) onscreen readme + colleee. The most successful, prolific set was online + college.With one exception (Wilder, 2005), I read only peer-reviewed articles and arbitrarily chose 2003 as the cut-oft date for current literature. The digital world evolves so quickly that I thought earlier articles, most likely written about research from 2002 or earlier, would not reflect the state of students' usage trends. I excluded articles that investigated Enelish-laneuaee-learnine students readme online, colleee faculty online practices, eeneral teaching methods for online environments, online writing, secondary student online reading, and research in third world countries. There are articles in these areas, but I kept a narrow focus for this review.Definition of TermsThe literature of college student online has several terms that appear often enough that an explanation of them seems appropriate.Online reading, onscreen reading, and e-reading are seemingly interchangeable terms that do not appear to be defined in the literature but are assumed to be part of our lay vocabulary. All three mean the of text, video, and graphics on an electronic screen, whether it is a computer, television, or hand-held device. This type of is contrasted to on paper in books, magazines, journals, and from a printer. There was one exception to the definition of online (McCrudden, Magliano, & Schraw, 2011), where it meant moment-tomoment processing of text during reading (p. …