Children's reading outcomes in digital and print mediums: A systematic review
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Given the growing reliance on digital devices, an increasing number of studies have examined the effects of text medium on reading outcomes in development; however, the results have been mixed. The goal of this systematic review is to look at how print and digital formats affect reading comprehension, engagement and other reading outcomes (e.g. vocabulary, reading speed) in children and adolescents aged 1–17 years old while also considering the influence of several participant, task and study characteristics. Methods A comprehensive search strategy involving seven electronic databases yielded 88 eligible articles comparing digital and print formats on reading outcomes published between 2000 and 2023 (3 reviewer inter‐rater reliability: k = .54–.78). Three major characteristics were coded: participant‐level (grade/age, diverse populations, testing language); task‐level (text‐genre, shared reading, digital comparability); study‐level (publication recency, study quality) characteristics. Contingency tables were created for all studies, then for each reading outcome and for participant, task, and study characteristics separately to classify the percentage of studies that demonstrated outcomes favouring print, digital, no difference or reliance on specific reading measures or other factors. Results Except in the case of engagement as an outcome, the most common finding was no difference between digital and print. When participant, task and study characteristics were examined separately for the various reading outcomes, the results varied. More studies examining reading comprehension (particularly of informational text and in older children) found ‘print is better’, whereas ‘digital is better’ was more common in studies examining engagement, other outcomes such as vocabulary and diverse learners. Conclusions This review highlights the importance of examining multiple interacting factors when studying the impact of print versus digital mediums on reading outcomes in children and adolescents.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it