Special Report

How Technology Is Shaping Reading Instruction—for Better or Worse

March 15, 2023
ed tech survey march 2023 schwartz
F. Sheehan / Education Week and Getty

Students’ reading skills are one of the major predictors of success in school and later in life. And, now, technology is shaping how children and adults read more than ever before. That transition from reading print books to reading on computer screens raises all kinds of questions about how technology helps students develop better reading skills on one hand and hurts those skills on the other. At the same time, there are new digital reading tools on the market, such as adaptive software that adjusts to students' reading levels. Identifying the technologies that work best is challenging for educators, but could yield big benefits for students.