A developmental shift in retention of content from digital and paper sources?

It has been shown (Mangen et al, 2013) that primary school children do better in tests of factual recall when they read printed text material compared to digital text material. This latter study was performed on tenth grade school children in Norway. Similar studies on university-age students in the UK have not been extensively reported up to now. Here we report on a study that looked at higher education (HE) students at levels 4 and 6 (Years 1 and 3) in a UK HE institution to determine if there were differences manifested in the ability to accurately recall information from paper and digitally-presented content as students progressed through the university system. Students were presented with the same body of information and could choose whether to study that information in digital or paper forms in a time constrained manner. Immediately after this period students were presented with questions relating to the text studied. A preliminary analysis of the answers given by the participants in their first year of university studies (Level 4) revealed that there were significant differences between the accuracy of recall of information from the two media sources. Students gained higher marks on average when tested on their recall from paper compared to digital sources of information. However, no such differences were manifested in the final year (Level 6) cohort. Mangen (2008) has suggested that student learning from any media source is crucially dependent on the nature of the physical interaction between student and media source. We hypothesise that as students progress through the HE system they are increasingly able to efficiently retain information from a variety of media sources