奇速英语

纸质阅读VS屏幕阅读，哪个更好？

Want to know the current population of India? The Internet is your best choice. Need a quick review on the phases of the moon(月相)? Go ahead, read a story online (or two or three). But if you really need to learn something, you’re probably better off with print. Or at least that’s what a lot of research now suggests.

Many studies have shown that when people read on-screen, they don’t understand what they’ve read as well as when they read in print. Even worse, many don’t realize they’re not getting it. For example, researchers in Spain and Israel took a close look at 54 studies comparing digital and print reading. Their 2018 study involved more than 171,000 readers. Comprehension, they found, was better overall when people read print rather than digital texts.

Patricia Alexander is a psychologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. She studies how we learn. Much of her research has deeply researched the differences between reading in print and on-screen. Alexander says students often think they learn more from reading online. When tested, though, it turns out that they actually learned less than when reading in print.

Reading is not natural. Learning to read takes real work. The brain has no special network of cells just for reading, so it might slip into skim(浏览) mode when you’re reading on a screen. And it may switch to deep-reading mode when you turn to print. But the results don’t just depend on the device, however. It also depends on what you assume about the text. If we think it will be easy, we might not put in much effort. Much of what we read on-screen tends to be text messages and social-media posts. They’re usually easy to understand. So, when people read on-screen, they read faster. When reading fast, we may not absorb all the ideas as well.