How Interaction Influences Academic Reading— a Comparison of Paper and Laptop

Abstract

Academic reading, a form of active reading, often involves interaction with the text. Highlighting and annotating are some of the most common strategies of interacting with academic texts, yet we have limited understanding of exactly how such interaction affects reading comprehension in digital versus analog reading environments. In this paper, we compare how university students (N=50) interact with a digital and a physical text, focusing on highlights and annotations. We compare reading speed, interaction with, and subsequent memory of the texts. We make nine observations about reading speed, highlighting frequency and memory scores between paper and laptop. We find indications that highlighting and annotating when reading a digital text has a higher impact on memory than when reading a paper text, and suggest that the main challenge for designers of digital reading support tools appears to be better designs for active annotation.