The Digital Reading Lab stems from a trans-institutional (TIPS) grant where reading educators, psychometricians, computer scientists, physicists, and even English professors came together to build understandings of digital reading.
Project Summary
The Digital Reading Project investigates how middle-grade students (grades 5-8) read and comprehend texts across digital and paper formats. By capturing in-the-moment reading behaviors, such as eye gaze, highlighting, scrolling, and other digital actions, our team examines how different reading mediums shape comprehension and engagement.
Grant Work
Funded by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, our team aims to identify:
- What is similar and different about digital reading?
- How do in-the-moment behaviors (like eye-gaze, emotional response, highlighting, mouse movement, scrolling, zooming, etc.) connect to comprehension?
- How does this differ in different digital reading contexts involving different tasks, texts, and readers?
This study has been preregistered within the Center for Open Science -- OSF registries (see https://osf.io/f87sp).
Why It Matters
In the era of COVID-19 and widespread digital learning, students are reading more on screens than ever before. Yet, we know little about how digital reading differs from traditional paper reading, or how these differences affect comprehension. Understanding these processes can inform instruction, assessment, and the design of future learning technologies. Process data (eye gaze, scrolling, highlighting, and timing) offers a powerful window into how students think and learn as they read.
Evolving Insights
Designed to compare reading processes across digital and paper mediums, the project has evolved to explore how reader, text, and task characteristics interact with medium to influence comprehension. Through iterative research and development, we have refined both our protocols and technologies, moving from lab-based tools to scalable, classroom-ready systems. This work continues to build a detailed, real-world picture of how students read in today’s digital environments.