The digital classroom

College e-textbooks have long been seen as salvation by many textbook publishers. That hope may be misguided. According to a Seattle Times report , in a study conducted on computer science students that will be released next week, researchers at the University of Washington found that, “Seven months into the study, more than 60 percent of the students had stopped using their Kindle regularly for academic reading — and these were computer science students, who are presumably more sympathetic to an electronic book.”

Alex Thayer, a UW doctoral student in design and engineering, and one of the authors of the report, told the Times,”There is no e-reader that supports what we found these students doing. It remains to be seen how to design one. It’s a great space to get in to, there’s a lot of opportunity.”

The study, involving 39 first-year graduate students in computer science and engineering, used the largest Kindle, the DX, a $379.00 investment. While the device allows note-taking, the report noted that “students still tucked paper into the Kindle case to write notes and others would read near a computer that they could use for reference and other tasks that weren’t easy on the device.”

Other findings on student textbook reading habits discussed in the report were:

• Students did most of the reading in fixed locations: 47 percent of reading was at home, 25 percent at school, 17 percent on a bus and 11 percent in a coffee shop or office.
• The Kindle DX was more likely to replace students’ paper-based reading than their computer-based reading.
• Of the students who continued to use the device, some read near a computer so they could look up references or do other tasks that were easier to do on a computer. Others tucked a sheet of paper into the case so they could write notes.
• With paper, three quarters of students marked up texts as they read. This included highlighting key passages, underlining, drawing pictures and writing notes in margins.
• A drawback of the Kindle DX was the difficulty of switching between reading techniques, such as skimming an article’s illustrations or references just before reading the complete text. Students frequently made such switches as they read course material.
• The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues, such as the location on the page and the position in the book to find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.

All points certain to be duly noted by the Seattle developers.