Improving Critical Reading with E-Texts: A Controlled Study in a Collegiate Philosophy Course

Lauren Scharff,Mark Jensen

doi:10.14434/josotl.v19i2.23978

Abstract

This project investigated the impact of incorporating e-reader texts and annotation tools in an upper level philosophy course. This project adds to the body of literature that assesses gains/losses in conventional measures of performance (e.g., scores on graded assignments) and changes in student attitudes as reported in questionnaires. However, this project was unique in that it focused on training students to use e-reader tools for critical reading practices and it included assessment of student annotations and their relationship with the performance measures. We tested the hypothesis that, with intentional training and a course-design that provided multiple opportunities for practice and feedback, students using e-readers for critical engagement with their reading assignments would demonstrate (a) deeper understanding of the content of the texts, (b) improvement in their use of critical reading practices, and (c) improvement in their attitudes toward the use of e-readers for academic work. While we did not observe significant gains in graded assignments compared with control groups using printed texts, we found no evidence of losses for students using e-readers. At the same time, we found evidence of improvement in students’ critical reading practices, especially when paired with modeling and practice throughout the term. We also observed significant positive changes in student attitudes toward the use of e-readers for academic work, compared with controls. Our findings suggest that achieving the benefits of e-readers for the development of critical reading skills requires a course with design elements that are specifically tailored to this purpose.

Highlights

Critical reading, or what some scholars have called “deep reading” (Wolf & Barzillai, 2009), is vital to contemporary democratic citizenship, insofar as a flourishing liberal democracy depends on informed, engaged, and well-read citizens who are the key decision-makers in the democratic political system (Dahl, 2000)
We describe our own study that engages this question directly: “What impact does a course intentionally designed around cultivating critical reading skills in an e-reader environment have on student learning?” We share the view of Dennis and his team that e-readers have the potential to enhance students’ critical reading skills and the view that they have this potential in light of the specific tools available in e-reader apps that allow students to bookmark, underline, outline, cross-reference, search, and annotate a text
A review of our results offers support for many but not all of our current hypotheses, and provides support for our earlier preliminary conclusions (Jensen & Scharff, 2014) that critical reading is challenging to develop, that a course design that pervasively incorporates development of annotation skills using an e-text is effective, and that practice using an e-text and its annotation features can lead to significant positive shifts in attitudes about e-texts

Summary

Introduction

What some scholars have called “deep reading” (Wolf & Barzillai, 2009), is vital to contemporary democratic citizenship, insofar as a flourishing liberal democracy depends on informed, engaged, and well-read citizens who are the key decision-makers in the democratic political system (Dahl, 2000). [Critical readers] pay attention to the genre of the text and what might be known about the author’s context They aim to make sense of the author’s support, defense, and development of the central message. They challenge the text, raising questions and objections about the truth of the central message, and about the author’s argument in its defense In the end, they see each text as part of a conversation in which their own Jensen and Scharff reflections become new contributions to advance our collective understanding of the issues in question. Neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has discovered that our brains work differently when we read a paper text versus an e-text (Wolf, 2010). Singer and Alexander (2016) found that while students predicted that they would do better on follow-up tests when working from an e-text, this was not the case

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