Commentary by Dr. Whitesel: There is a tech trend in our Sunday services, of which I have been in favor, to replace printed bibles and sermon note handouts with e-bibles and electronic notation. Yet research indicates this may hinder retention. Research cited below indicates that a printed book fosters memorization/retention more than an e-book. Research discovered that writing out your notes on paper similarity promotes “contexts and landmarks” which further foster learning. With advances in technology such weaknesses will eventually be overcome. But in the meantime, churches may want to return to the availability of paper bibles and handouts for notes. If we are serious about helping congregants move from “remembering” to “knowing,” then sometimes being an early adopter may result in acting too quickly.
Read this overview in TIME magazine with links to the original research …
“Do E-Books Make It Harder to Remember What You Just Read? Digital books are lighter and more convenient to tote around than paper books, but there may be advantages to old technology”
by Maia Szalavitz, Time Magazine, 3/14/15.
… I discovered that Google’s Larry Page himself had concerns about research showing that on-screen reading is measurably slower than reading on paper.
This seems like a particularly troubling trend for academia, where digital books are slowly overtaking the heavy tomes I used to lug around. On many levels, e-books seem like better alternatives to textbooks — they can be easily updated and many formats allow readers to interact with the material more, with quizzes, video, audio and other multimedia to reinforce lessons. But some studies suggest that there may be significant advantages in printed books if your goal is to remember what you read long-term…
Context and landmarks may actually be important to going from “remembering” to “knowing.” The more associations a particular memory can trigger, the more easily it tends to be recalled. Consequently, seemingly irrelevant factors like remembering whether you read something at the top or the bottom of page — or whether it was on the right or left hand side of a two-page spread or near a graphic — can help cement material in mind…
This seems irrelevant at first, but spatial context may be particularly important because evolution may have shaped the mind to easily recall location cues so we can find our way around. That’s why great memorizers since antiquity have used a trick called the “method of loci” to associate facts they want to remember with places in spaces they already know, like rooms in their childhood home. They then visualize themselves wandering sequentially through the rooms, recalling the items as they go…
E-books, however, provide fewer spatial landmarks than print, especially pared-down versions like the early Kindles, which simply scroll through text and don’t even show page numbers, just the percentage already read. In a sense, the page is infinite and limitless, which can be dizzying. Printed books on the other hand, give us a physical reference point, and part of our recall includes how far along in the book we are, something that’s more challenging to assess on an e-book…
Read more at … http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/14/do-e-books-impair-memory/
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