Reading Paper – Reading Screen: A Comparison of Reading Literacy in Two Different Modes

An interest in reading literacy in different modes as well as implications for assessment provides the basis for the present study. The design aimed to investigate differences in performance when the same reading literacy test was administered on paper and on screen to a sample of Swedish students. The results showed a minor overall difference in favour of the paper mode. When the analysis was broken down and conducted on different text types, it showed that this pattern applied to shorter texts and texts with much factual information in particular.

"The overall results indicated a small difference in favour of the paper version of the test for the present sample of Swedish students. Moreover, when the analysis was broken down into types of texts, length of texts, gender, and non-response rates, this trend was consistent, although the magnitudes between the two modes varied. The students got higher scores on paper than on screen for expository texts, although the difference was modest. A negligible difference was found for the other two text types, documents and narrative texts. The short texts and the long texts rendered different results. The students managed the short texts slightly better on paper than on screen, whereas almost no difference in reading literacy was seen between the two modes for long texts. On the whole, the differences found were mainly due to the boys’ results. Girls read texts equally well on paper and on screen, while boys managed texts on paper somewhat better than on screen. Furthermore, girls performed better than boys in both modes, but the difference in the paper version was insignificant; a more notable gender difference was found in the screen mode. Finally, the overall results showed, to some extent, a lower non-response rate in the screen mode than in the paper mode, and, in addition, some gender differences. The girls had a lower non-response rate on both tests than the boys. The girls also had a lower non-response rate on the screen test than on the paper test, whereas the boys showed no such difference between the two modes." (Author, 14-15)