Preferring Print in a Digital World: An International Study of Students' Academic Reading Behaviors

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; however, recent data suggests the opposite is true in a majority of cases. Readers use different strategies - skimming, scanning, deep reading - for different contexts and purposes, and university students may prefer electronic reading for some of these. 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 2014-2016 to investigate their self-reported behaviors and attitudes towards print and electronic reading for their academic work. The findings document widespread preferences for reading print for learning, self-reports of different types of behavioral engagement with print versus electronic texts, and beliefs among students that they learn and remember information better from print formats. The possible explanations for this and implications for higher educators are discussed in this paper.