The pandemic rewrote the rules on many things in education—including how much students read digital texts compared with printed ones.
With advances in tech tools and emerging research that has found printed reading materials may not always trump digital ones when it comes to student comprehension, Education Week wanted to know: What’s actually happening in classrooms?
The EdWeek Research Center surveyed teachers nationally to probe how they use digital and printed reading materials.
Teachers’ decisions to assign digital or print texts is largely based on what they perceive will best meet students’ needs. The largest share of teachers—46 percent—say they base their decisions on what format is most effective in making reading material easy to understand.
While nearly 20 percent of teachers say that the percentage of digital reading materials they will use in their classroom in the next year will most likely increase, about three-quarters of them said they expect the ratio to remain about the same.
The following charts illustrate how much and why teachers are using digital texts in their classrooms.
