Cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham said that digital devices aren’t changing the way kids read in terms of actual cognitive processes—putting together letters to make words, and words to make sentences. In fact, Willingham is quick to point out that in terms of “raw words,” kids are reading more now than they were a decade ago (thanks mostly to text messaging). But he does believe, as he writes in his book, The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads, that kids’ reading habits are changing. And it’s reasonable to guess that digital technology, in all its three-second-video and Snapchat glory, is changing those habits.

In the chapter “Reading After the Digital Revolution,” Willingham, who has four children of his own, takes a measured approach toward screen reading.

“Digital reading is good in some ways, and bad in others,” he said: in other words, it’s complicated. Much of the online interaction that kids take part in involves reading, including texting, social media and even gaming. And all that online reading increases ‘word knowledge,’ or repeated exposure to words, even if there isn’t a big range of vocabulary words to draw from in text messages back and forth to friends. But will all of this reading of texts and Instagram posts make kids better readers?

“Probably not,” he said. “Based on theory, it’s not going to influence reading comprehension at all. After all, they’re not reading a New York Times article on Instagram. They’re mostly taking selfies and posting comments.”

KQED/Kelly McLachlan (KQED/Kelly McLachlan)

For many parents and teachers worried that spending so much time with video games and Snapchats will shred kids’ attention spans—the average 8-12-year-old spends about six hours a day in front of a screen, and teenagers spend more than nine — Willingham thinks they may be concerned about the wrong thing. He isn’t convinced that spending so many hours playing Super Smash Bros will shorten kids’ attention spans, making them unable to sustain the attention to read a book. He’s more concerned that Super Smash Bros has trained kids’ brains to crave experiences that are more like fast-paced video games.

“The change we are seeing is not that kids can’t pay attention to things, it’s that they’re not as interested in paying attention to things,” he said. “They have less patience for being bored. What I think that all the digital activities have in common is that, with very little effort from me, something interesting happens. And if I’m bored, another interesting experience is very easy to obtain.” Instead, reading's payoff often comes after some effort and maybe even a little boredom in the beginning. But the slower-paced pleasure comes with more satisfaction in the end.

Watermelon for dessert instead of chocolate

Willingham said it’s a mistake for adults to deny the fun of a kitty cat video or Buzzfeed listicle—but instead to help kids distinguish between the easy pleasures of some digital media, and the more complex payoff that comes when reaching the end of the Harry Potter series. He recommends telling kids that you want them to experience both, part of a larger strategy to make reading a family value.

“It’s watermelon or chocolate for dessert. I love watermelon and so do my kids, but chocolate is more tempting,” he said. “I want my kids to enjoy chocolate, but I want them to eat watermelon because it’s a little more enriching and it's a different kind of enjoyment."

“So I think that reading is enriching in ways that lots of digital experiences aren’t enriching. Parents and teachers should confront this head on, and say [to their kids and students], ‘There are fast pleasures with a quick payoff, and there are things that build slowly and take more sustained effort on your part. And I want you to experience both.’”

Taking time to experience the slower pace and pleasures of reading is especially important for younger children, and Willingham is in favor of limiting screen time in order to give kids space to discover the pleasures of reading. Kids who never experienced the satisfaction of reaching the end of a book won’t know to make room for it when they are older.

And for older kids, coordinate with their friends’ parents and teachers to reduce the amount of time spent online. Every little bit helps to build their long-pleasure reading muscles.

KQED/Kelly McLachlan (KQED/Kelly McLachlan)

How reading online changes attention

According to Julie Coiro, a reading researcher at the University of Rhode Island, moving from digital to paper and back again is only a piece of the attention puzzle: the larger and more pressing issue is how reading online is taxing kids’ attention. Online reading, Coiro noticed, complicates the comprehension process “a million-fold.”

As more and more of kids’ reading takes place online, especially for schoolwork, Coiro has been studying how kids’ brains have had to adjust. Her research, conducted on middle- and high school students as well as college students, shows that reading online requires more attention than reading a paper book. Every single action a student takes online offers multiple choices, requiring an astounding amount of self-regulation to both find and understand needed information.

Each time a student reads online content, Coiro said, they are faced with almost limitless input and decisions, including images, video and multiple hyperlinks that lead to even more information. As kids navigate a website, they must constantly ask themselves: is this the information I’m looking for? What if I click on one of the many links, will that get me closer or farther away from what I need? This process doesn’t happen automatically, she said, but the brain must work to make each choice a wise one.

“It used to be that there was a pre-reading, the reading itself, and the evaluation at the end of your chapter or at the end of a book,” Coiro said. “Now that process happens repeatedly in about 4 seconds: I choose a link. I decide whether I want to be here/I don’t want to be here, and then, where should I go next?”

In one of Coiro’s studies of middle schoolers, she found that good readers on paper weren’t necessarily good readers online. The ability to generate search terms, evaluate the information and integrate ideas from multiple sources and media makes online reading comprehension, she argues, a critical set of skills that builds on those required to read a physical book.

“We make the assumption that we’re going to keep them safe and protected if we have kids read mostly in the print world,” Coiro said. “And if they’re good readers in that world, they’re just going to naturally be a good reader in a complex online world. That’s so not the case.”

To navigate a new world straddled between digital and physical reading, adults are finding ways to try and balance both. Though there is plenty of distracting media out there vying for kids’ attention, digital reading companies like Epic! are trying to keep the reading experience as close to a real book as possible. Suren Markosian, Epic!’s co-founder and CEO, created the app in part for his own young children. He said they made a conscious choice to keep ads, video content and hyperlinks outside of the book-reading experience. “Once inside a book, you get a full-screen view,” he said. “You are basically committing to reading the book and nothing else.”

Some teachers have taken a more aggressive approach toward making space for reading, taking Willingham’s advice to talk to students head-on about putting down digital devices. Jarred Amato, a high school ELA teacher in Nashville, Tennessee, created a 24-hour digital cleanse for his freshman to crack the surface of what he calls their “smartphone addiction.”

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