Digital Literacy

With the recent, and in some cases sudden, surge in digital learning, skillsets continue to emerge that are vital to student learning outcomes and the technologies that support them. Mastering the navigation of these shifts require digital literacy alongside traditional literacy. It is a vast and paperless landscape with the capacity to move forward and backward simultaneously, and thus no time to waste in teaching our students these important skills.

The definitions of digital literacy are consistently defined as a process of information creation and evaluation. The following three definitions are springboards from which to work in specific skills and subskills within effective literacy instruction:

Definition 1:

“The ability to create, navigate, and evaluate information on various digital platforms.” (Willingham, 2017)

Definition 2:

“The ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.” American Library Association, 2020

Definition 3:

“The ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet.” Cornell University, 2020

2021 Digital Literacy Skills: What is Next? Let’s take a deep dive into exactly how literacy changes for students; where the gaps lie, and what the behaviors are that rise to the challenges, in consideration of one driving question: HH   How How is the use of deliberate reading strategy that incorporates background knowledge, decoding, phonemic awareness, phonological process and fluency, be potentially affected by an increase in the reading of electronic print?

The literature review that follows was conducted to answer this important question, and offers a number of proposed solutions by examining the reading habits of children and adolescents. Current studies have quantified general attitudes and habits that students employ when reading digitally. Findings indicate that with the use of intentional strategy, there can be an overall, positive effect on functional literacy with wide applications for teaching. An overview of evidence-based literacy strategies conclude this paper, along with a number of blended learning resources to support student learning.

First, the experiences of young and adolescent readers: As reading experiences continue to move online, and as the need continues to advance and strengthen reading skills, traditional reading skills need to change. Because the tactile nature of reading print on paper create a different reading experience, the process of scrolling, viewing pixels, hyperlinks, task-switching, etc., is one in which sequencing and memory for detail can be compromised (Mangen, 2015). Ideally, the printed and the digital should be used simultaneously, where one can enhance the other (Wolf, 2018). The strategies that worked with one medium do not necessarily translate to another, unless they are explicitly taught. The onus to teach these intentional strategies is on the teacher (Willingham, 2017; Wolf, 2018).

Screen vs. Paper

With the use of deliberate strategy, such as background knowledge, effective decoding, phonemic awareness, phonological processing, and fluency, the core process of reading from a screen undergoes change due to constant task-switching, and the continuous distraction involved in e-reading. For example, children raised without varied devices and with more human support do better on language tasks (Mangen, 2015). Missing eye-to-eye contact, focusing on one particular child, intonation, etc., can affect a student’s response to language instruction in a negative way because human interaction matters greatly in early literacy development. With information overload, background knowledge becomes more challenging to apply to reading, thus impeding the ability to predict, make inferences, deduce, etc., (Wolf, 2018). While engagement is important, the more enhanced an e-book, the more likely readers can become distracted from a story’s narrative (Mangen, 2015). There are, however, solutions to all of this, and they will come later. For now, let’s look at some statistics about digital consumption:

• The average person in the U.S. consumes the equivalent of 10,000 to 50,000 words a day across digital devices (Wolf, 2018).
• The average person in the U.S. reads the daily equivalent to the same number of words in a novel, but it is neither sustained nor continuous reading, and is more equivalent to “bursts of activity” (Wolf, 2018).
• As of 2015, the average amount of time by 3 to 5-year-olds spent on digital devices was 4 hours per day, up 52 percent from 2013.
• As of 2015, ninety-percent of teens owned or used smartphones, and spent on average 90% screen time texting (Lenhart, 2015).
• On average, people in their twenties checked their cell phones between 150 and 190 times a day. They also switch media over 20 times an hour (Wolf, 2018).
• Teens use digital technologies on average of 8 hours per day (Willingham, 2017). Reading among teens has not increased or decreased statistically since 1999, from 21 minutes per day to now 28.
• There has been a noted decline of 40% in empathy among young people and college students in the last two decades, most taking place after 2000. Online navigation at the cost of real-time interaction is largely to blame (Turkle, 2015).
• Constant activity and increased screen time – or attachment to one’s digital device – has an effect on cognition, an important aspect to the reading process with residual effects that are vital to meaning-making, perspective, and empathy (Wolf, 2018).

The Academic Cost

Young readers often struggle with reconstructing a narrative and remembering details. They are more likely to remember sequence and details of plot when reading on screen (Mangen, 2015). While it is widely known that reading improves comprehension through broader background knowledge, vocabulary, and with pictorial representation of words, the gain for students on the World Wide Web are typically not content-rich enough to factor in or make a great difference (Willingham, 2017). In addition to scrolling, interruptions from advertisements and third party feeds, along with greater multi-tasking, the quality of reading will ultimately depend upon the choices one makes while reading, especially in the process of deep reading, regardless of the medium (Wolf, 2018). “It takes years for deep-reading processes to be formed, and as a society we need to be sure that we are vigilant about their development in our young from a very early age” (Wolf, p. 38, 2018).

Features That Help or Hinder Comprehension

The success of a reading application hinges upon many factors that must work and sync together with precision: complimenting ancillary materials, digital content, pacing, reviews, and assessment all matter. It is less about the content, and more about the workings and features of the application itself.

In many studies, e-readers are shown to be superior for reading comprehension, phonological awareness, and in knowledge of letters (Wolf, 2018). There are wide variances when parent-child interaction is involved in reading an e-book together, both good and bad. Results revealed that parent–child dialogic reading and children’s story comprehension were both negatively affected by the presence of electronic features (Parish-Morris, et al., 2011; Wolf, 2018). Attention is influenced by switching among multiple digital devices with rapid web-surfing and task-switching among applications that result in over-stimulation. Changes in design can result in differences in comprehension, some more positive than others. For instance, comprehension is better when navigating a book by flipping virtual pages versus scrolling (Kretzschmar, et al., 2013 In: Willingham, 2017). Multiple digital distractors were found to interfere with comprehension. Users report having to exert more effort when reading from a screen due to hypelinks, third-party links, pop-up ads, multiple applications running in the background, and the lack of organization in which content is often laid out (Connell, et al., 2012; Daniel & Woody, 2013; Ackerman & Lauterman, 2012).  Without these types of distractors, e-reading can result in experiences that allow readers a seamless experience with access to important spatial cues. This works into deep comprehension, and is perhaps why survey data show consistent numbers of students prefer paper textbooks to electronic, with Kindles used for “lighter” reading. Design is of utmost importance consideration of its impact on student reading outcomes (Willingham, 2017; Wolf, 2018).

The Impact on Writing:

Textese is a term used to describe how words are pared down to bare communication essentials in order to effectuate short sound bites of information, distributed via instant messaging channels. Unnecessary words are omitted, as are capitalization, and punctuation.  Accurate spelling is also replaced with acronyms. This is fully acceptable speech when using it to communicate via text, but it doesn’t translate to the real world of writing, nor does it transfer to the expectations in K-12 learning. When students use this type of communication, it is often found to transfer into academic writing tasks. In addition, textese is associated with poor word reading and spelling in older students (Drouin & Driver, 2012). With advances in technology, and with wider availability of built-in spell and grammar checks, there are now allowances for less textese resulting from auto-correction and the insertion.  However, the transfer, or lack of proper transfer, can continue to be problematic without explicit teaching to the contrary (Common Sense Media, 2017).