Abstract:

With today’s online technology and wireless connections, the average person is likely to engage in more electronic reading – emails, text messages, and social media – than print. It is easy to assume that college students, most of whom grew up in a ubiquitously digital environment, would prefer to read their academic texts electronically as well. It is well known that readers use different strategies – skimming, scanning, deep reading – for different contexts and purposes. But reading academic texts for learning and understanding purposes is different than scanning headlines and Facebook posts; it requires focused and intensive engagement. The Academic Reading Format International Study (ARFIS) collected data from students in over 30 countries from 2014-2017 to investigate their behaviors and attitudes towards print and electronic reading for their academic work. Three facets were explored: format preferences, learning engagement beliefs and behaviors, and the impact of the language of the reading. Analysis of the amalgamated results are still ongoing, but in this presentation we will share what we have learned so far from the students’ learning engagement beliefs and behaviors when reading online and in print, and the impact of language on their choices. The results are from over 10,000 students in 21 participating countries.

ARFIS was born in 2014 at the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL) after the presentation of a local study at a large research institution in the United States. Academics in several additional countries expressed interest in replicating the research to produce a worldwide comparative study. The original questionnaire was slightly revised to better suit the international participant pool. Its current form, containing 23 Likert-style and demographic questions with spaces for open comments, was uploaded to LimeSurvey, an online platform with features favorable to large multi-language studies. Each researcher was responsible for the translation and distribution of the survey at their institution and retains ownership of their country data. ARFIS results are generated from quantitative analysis of the amalgamated data, and shows that students worldwide prefer to read their academic material in print rather than electronically but that preference variations among individual countries are notable.

This is the largest study of its kind to date and we will also address some of the challenges we have faced in executing such a broad international study: revising the survey instrument, communicating among researchers, ensuring quality of translations, and publishing our results.

We will raise questions for our audience to consider on the impact of our findings on education and pedagogical policies, and look forward to their questions and comments in return.

Keywords:

Print reading, electronic reading, academic reading international studies, college students.