Is it the size, the movement, or both? Investigating effects of screen size and text movement on processing, understanding, and motivation when students read informational text

Abstract

This study focused on the potential effects of screen size (smartphone vs. tablet) and text movement (scrolling vs. paging) on integrated understanding of text information, strategic backtracking, and intrinsic reading motivation when Norwegian university students read an informational text on either a smartphone or a tablet by either scrolling or paging. We expected that paging would lead to better integrated understanding of the text and more strategic backtracking than scrolling. Also, we explored whether scrolling would lower the intrinsic motivation for performing the reading task, and whether there were interactional effects of screen size with text movement on integrated understanding, strategic backtracking, and intrinsic motivation. Results indicated that students tended to obtain better integrated understanding when paging than when scrolling, and that those who paged through the text displayed more strategic backtracking than those who scrolled. Further, scrolling on a tablet led to a more positive reading experience than paging on a tablet or scrolling on a smartphone. In addressing two basic aspects of the reading context and the reading activity when students read digital text for understanding, this study provides new insights into the complex digital reading puzzle that may have both theoretical and practical implications.

Reading comprehension on handheld devices versus on paper: A narrative review and meta-analysis of the medium effect and its moderators.

“…With respect to page navigation, no difference was found between horizontal paging and vertical scrolling. Although previous research suggested that scrolling could hinder readers’ construction of text structure (Haverkamp et al, 2023), this seems not to be the case when reading on handheld devices. However, it should be noted that only five primary effect sizes in our data set came from studies in which vertical scrolling was used to navigate the texts.…”

“…This feature, for example, allows the reader to get physically closer to the text when processing the content more in-depth (Ballenghein et al, 2020). Moreover, the layering of text pages on a handheld device is also more similar to that of pages in printed texts, which supports strategic backtracking to a higher extent than scrolling (Haverkamp et al, 2023).…”

“…Third, previous research has addressed the way in which readers navigate through text pages as an influential factor of text processing and comprehension. Text pages provide fixed cues for spatiotemporal orientation, but such cues are lost when digital documents use scrolling to navigate through the text (Haverkamp et al, 2023). Accordingly, scrolling may increase the negative effect of on-screen reading, as compared to those in which pages are fully presented on screen and navigated one by one.…”

Does students’ exposure to websites moderate the positive relationship between print exposure and text comprehension?

“…Gellert and Elbro (2013) concluded that the test was both valid and reliable after correlating it with standardized tests of reading comprehension. Reliability was satisfactory (Cronbach's α = 0.85) in a prior study including Norwegian secondary students (Bråten et al, 2019), and in two studies including Norwegian university students with α = 0.89 in Haverkamp et al (2022) (BA/MA students) and α = 0.83 in Latini et al (2019) (BA students). In the two studies including university students, analyses of correlation showed a statistical significantly relationships between the cloze comprehension test and text integration measures.…”

“…Although the text comprehension test has been demonstrated to have acceptable reliability and validity in several studies (e.g. Gellert and Elbro, 2013;Haverkamp et al, 2022), a cloze test will normally be restricted to measuring comprehension at sentence and passage level (Trace, 2020). Hence, the text comprehension measure could be accompanied by a measure of multiple text or digital text comprehension, potentially measuring the challenges readers often are confronted with in evaluating and integrating information across different sources (Bråten et al, 2018).…”