Moving from a Nation of Skimmers to Biliterate Readers

By Thomas Nowalk  

Your brain is likely lit up like the Las Vegas strip as you read this article. Multiple areas of the brain are capturing images, processing sounds, and even reacting emotionally to an image of the famous city and its casinos. The brain is a busy switchboard when reading.

If you read a blog post written in Chinese, Arabic or Nepali, with the different orthographies of those languages, then other parts of the brain may also be working; at least the wiring is different for reading those languages. Whether learning to read English or any of those languages, it takes years of school to train the brain for fluent comprehension.

How the brain lights up also depends on the media. Reading printed text differs from digital or screen-based reading. Anyone who has enjoyed a good book while sitting at the beach or opened up a newspaper on a Sunday morning, the paper spread out on the kitchen table, should recall the multi-sensory experience of print; opening the text, turning the pages, or—in the case of the newspaper—smelling the ink that rubs off on your fingertips. 

But that is not what happens when reading on a screen. It is still multi-sensory with the scrolling and the clicking of the mouse, but it’s not as tactile. A professor at San Jose State University, Ziming Liu, describes screen reading as browsing about, scanning and skimming for information. It works more like speed reading with the eyes jumping and skipping through the screen in F or Z patterns. 

The rise of digital media through tablets, cell phones, and computer screens is so pervasive that learning is changing. The debate heating up through the halls of our schools is whether today’s children should be taught with printed material or digital? The teachers and educators taking sides on this debate sometimes have to stop or excuse themselves from the discussion to check their cell phones. Some messages just can’t be ignored.

And that, for many people, is the point: the world has gone paperless. Schools should go paperless, too. Our digitized world means that children today have spent tens of thousands of hours on a variety of screens before reaching college. That’s how our children consume information on Google, Wikipedia, YouTube and social media. More importantly, teachers themselves increasingly rely on digital media as technology changes education. In effect, the world has already moved on from print.

Education writer Marc Prensky has argued strongly for schools that are designed for the digital habits of today’s students. In a much-discussed article written in 2001, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” Prensky describes people born after 1984 as digital natives, which he defines as “native speakers of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet.” The rest of us, those born before 1984, Prensky names “digital immigrants,” or the other generations who migrated to digital after significant time in an analog world.

The significance of Prensky’s argument, and many other thinkers today, is that current schools are designed for teaching us aging analogs (my term) instead of today’s digital thinkers. Schools are based on an industrial model of schooling suited for the 20th century. Educators should redesign schools for digital natives.

Printed media has a very limited role in the modern, digital classroom.

The research shows an easy consensus on the state of the world: the ubiquitous influence of digital media. The use of smart phones has helped push us farther into a digital society. But consider another point of agreement among researchers: printed text is not only different, but it is also better for reading comprehension. 

Researcher Maryanne Wolf describes skimming as the new normal for reading. This is much like Liu’s description above. We are now a nation of skimmers. Wolf describes this kind of reading as shallow: insufficient for grasping the complexity of thought found in literature or a scientific report. Furthermore, she reminds us that deep reading is closely tied to critical thinking: we can’t make inferences, take on other perspectives, or practice empathy without slower, more attentive reading.

Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham describes the habits of mind that require practice in thinking through content, or pinpointing the deep structures of problems. After all, content—whether biology or history—is a system of ideas. Skimming through text limits the scrutinizing mind to the surface. Both researchers suggest critical thinking, and thus deep reading, as working through the interrelated facts, principles, and assumptions that make up school content.

Does this mean, digital reading is bad? No. We tend to frame issues in education as “either … or.” If students score higher with print, should we have our digital natives unplug and focus hard on their texts? Any parent or teacher today could easily imagine how smoothly that would work.

Indeed, printed material and digital media are tools for teachers. The better question is not a choice between, but how best to use for learning goals and learning conditions. Wolf calls attention to biliteracy in the classroom: today’s students develop proficiency with text and digital media. As Wolf and Willingham, and many educators note, the use of both tools takes practice. But habits can be taught.

The point of contention goes back to the brain. Prensky describes the digital natives in our classrooms as having a different brain: physically different from other generations. Which neuroscience suggests is somewhat accurate: the brain wires its circuitry according to a person’s most-frequently-lived experiences. Habituation, or the process of wiring up the brain, takes time.

But your brain is even physically changing while reading this article; the brain is dynamically changing and adapting to the events of our days. Learning is constant.

The flip side of habituation is the brain’s amazing plasticity. With practice the brain can adapt to new habits and accommodate to using tools in different ways. Years ago, skimming and scanning were part of reading instruction. Teachers practiced them with other comprehension strategies, such as identifying the main idea or mapping out the deep structure of a text. It is time to practice deep reading strategies with digital media. In short, it’s not so much the media but how best to use text content.   

Looking at the wider picture, biliteracy stands imperative for our times. Global organizations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) describe our digital age as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and increasingly smart automation applications will lead to the extinction of many of today’s jobs. Technology, often in the form of robots, will replace many more jobs.

The upside of these changes is what kind of work will remain; jobs that only people can do, such as software jobs or customer contact? Or jobs that only a human brain can do? Deloitte and the WEF have identified the top three job skills of the future; they are problem solving, critical thinking, and creativity. The list also includes decision making and cognitive flexibility. In short, the future will rely on knowledge workers that can think, innovate, and solve problems with an agile, flexible mind. 

Skimming won’t prepare our students for the world of the future. Neither will an education that has only applied digital media.

Biliteracy will.

Thomas Nowalk teaches, writes content, and designs learning experiences for diverse groups of people. He has worked for schools, non-profit organizations and large corporations for over 25 years. Thomas is an educator who facilitates change through continuous learning. He works for Random Words Marketing as a freelance content writer.