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E-textbooks Effectiveness Studied
By: Jordan Pye
Posted: February 8, 2012
Each new semester begins with a flurry of textbook purchases, price-comparisons, protests, rentals and returns. Concern for textbook costs has risen as steadily as the prices, but readers who reach for electronic textbooks to save money could end up costing themselves a better grade.
Although busy students don’t analyze the effectiveness of their reading habits, psychology professors Drs. David Daniel and Krisztina Jakobsen know that the medium used for a textbook impacts whether they receive the message. Daniel and Jakobsen were intrigued by the e-textbook trend because despite the hype, it remains an unproven learning tool.
“Everyone says e-textbooks are cheaper,” Daniel said. “No one says they’re better.” Until recently there was no data to evaluate if students learn as well from e-textbooks, despite the push from publishers, legislators and others to adopt them.
So how do students read e-textbooks differently from the familiar paper tomes? If the new trend in textbooks is moving them to computer screens, the switch could have negative consequences because evidence suggests that people skim more, process shallowly and retain less information when reading online, Daniel said.
“I think there’s already some move,” Jakobsen said, because “some professors in our department offer students an e-book that’s a cheaper alternative.”
To figure out where the differences between monitor and manuscript lie, Daniel and Jakobsen conducted a study last fall funded by a $10,000 grant from Cengage Technology. By combining his pedagogy research with her analysis of visual attention, they hoped to uncover why students read e-textbooks differently and if certain alterations could better accommodate learning.
The most acclaimed feature of e-textbooks is their affordability. For example, a psychology professor teaching an introductory course could assign the textbook Introduction to Psychology by Rod Plotnik and Haig Kouyoumdjian. When this article was written a hardcover version of the book on Amazon costs $144 and a used paperback version is $95, but the Kindle edition sells for $88. The comparison makes e-textbooks a deceptively appealing choice.
“E-textbooks are good for publishers because they can cut the bookstore out of their profit model – no need for the buyback process or used book sales,” Daniel said. “It is essentially an economic argument.”
This makes lower-income students especially vulnerable to the pitch, he added, because students from less prepared backgrounds or those who have less time to devote to their studies are being encouraged to use inferior products.
Despite these concerns, Daniel’s findings revealed that students do not like e-textbooks and when they are offered one for free they are likely to buy the paper book also. This agreed with a survey conducted in August 2008 by Student Public Interest Research Groups, in which 75 percent of student respondents said they preferred a printed textbook to a digital version, and 60 percent said would buy a low-cost print copy even if the digital book were free.
So why are e-books so popular while e-textbooks aren’t? Daniel said this is because the readers’ goals are different, and individuals reading an e-book for enjoyment aren’t required to pass a comprehension-based test afterward. He and Jakobsen observed that students greatly prefer paper textbooks, even if they have had previous experience with e-textbooks. While they found that learning is possible from both formats, learning from e-textbooks takes longer and requires more effort to reach the same level of understanding, even in a controlled lab environment.
Beginning in late September the duo employed eye-tracking technology, which shows patterns of how a reader looks at a page of text and generates heat maps to show how long or often the reader fixates on a section. To analyze how the book format affects comprehension, the study used student subjects who were taking a college psychology course for the first time and tested their knowledge after they read chapters from an introductory psychology textbook, either from a paper book or a computer screen.
A camera mounted on the monitor tracked the readers’ pupils as they scanned the pages, calculating the angle of where students looked and for how long, to record a path of where they skimmed, paused or doubled back while reading. By watching this movement over the page, “you can see literally every eye movement they make,” Jakobsen said, explaining that she and Daniel could tell if a student read a paragraph or followed instructions in the text to look at a graph or read a caption. In their preliminary findings, the scanpath produced when the student read a textbook showed consistent reading from line to line down the page. But the scanpath from reading on the screen was sparser.
“Although it takes longer, we found out that students can score the same reading comprehension as with a paper book, but interact differently than with print,” Daniel said. “Evidence suggests that people skim web pages while they read, picking out a line then skimming down the page and picking out another in a pattern that reads like a giant E or F down the page.” This method is ineffective for studying because too much information gets lost, causing the reader to have to reread sections as they check for understanding.
The results also showed that students are not likely to use the added multimedia features that make some-textbooks interactive. The links to these modules are typically imbedded within the text, but students generally want to finish the reading first. Those reading e-textbooks were more likely to skip embedded multimedia and hyperlinks than they would if they used a free website connected to the printed textbook.
“Reading and studying are different activities for many students, and we should be designing products that recognize that,” Daniel said. “When they are reading they want to finish reading and when they are studying they go straight for key words and tutorials because they want to review.”
The professors observed that natural and social science subjects are not a good fit for current e-textbooks, but there were exceptions for subjects where students learn formulas and can practice with activities. The math and chemistry teachers assigning the reading hope their students will learn the explanations and not just the formulas, but “students tend to skip the text and go straight to the formulas, especially if they are graded,” Daniel said.
When reading e-textbooks at home, students report that it takes them even longer and they are more likely to multi-task by using Facebook, electronic chat, texting or email than are their peers using printed textbooks. E-textbook publishers who simply transfer the printed pages into PDF format do not take advantage of the digital medium, and reading from a computer screen requires an additional layer of processing while providing easy access to distractions. Compared to print textbooks, e-textbooks are fairly inefficient study tools.
“Publishers can’t change the way people read online,” Daniel said, “but they can find new ways to format e-textbooks to make them more effective for how students learn best and prefer to interact with the product.”
