Students to e-textbooks: no thanks

Nicholas Carr:

Because the horse is not dead, I feel I'm allowed to keep beating it. So: Another study of student attitudes toward paper and electronic textbooks has appeared, and like earlier ones -- see here, here, here, for example -- it reveals that our so-called digital natives prefer print. The new study, by four researchers at Ryerson University in Toronto, appears in the Journal for Advancement of Marketing Education. "Although advocates of digitized information believe that millennial students would embrace the paperless in-person or online classroom, this is not proving to be the case," they write, as studies to date find "most students reiterating their preference for paper textbooks."

They point out that a lot of the research up to now has started "with the assumption that the innovation [in e-textbooks] is an improvement over previous technology":

Undergraduate students are generally assumed to be skilled in using digital resources for acquiring the knowledge necessary to achieve success in tests and exams. However, researchers often overlook students' personal beliefs about how they learn and study most effectively. Their resistance to replacing paper textbooks with e-textbooks together with an ongoing desire to be able to print electronic content suggests that paper-based information serves students' needs better in the educational context.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at March 1, 2013 1:36 AM
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