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World History on the World Wide Web: A Student Satisfaction Survey and a Blinding Flash of the Obvious1
James Longhurst
Carnegie Mellon University
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A COLLEAGUE OF MINE once observed that papers from first-year history students often feature blinding flashes of the obvious: sweeping declarations that war is bad, social inequality is unfair, or that China is a big place. These sorts of papers sometimes begin with mind-boggling generalizations like "Throughout history, all mankind has fought for justice" (or some other impossible-to-prove statement). This article contains just such a blinding flash of the obvious. It is an observation that results from analysis of student surveys, curricular planning and instructional design, but nonetheless seems spectacularly obvious in hindsight. However, we might gain some insight into the challenges of teaching with technology by considering why few writers or researchers have dealt with this particular blinding flash of the obvious. |
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Even technologically proficient students, though generally enthusiastic about the use of online materials in undergraduate courses, have deep reservations about reading assignments located on the web instead of paper. These concerns include cost consideration, physical and technological limitations of the various options, and a deeply-held concern about "readability" which should prompt a cautious approach by technology adopters. In particular, our experience in using sometimes-lengthy web-based readings in a history survey course at Carnegie Mellon University has demonstrated that students have a deeply-rooted aversion to reading these documents from their computer screens, which may result in lowered levels of assignment completion, decreased comprehension, or other unintended consequences. |
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Though this statement seems obvious on its face, it is rarely addressed in discussions of teaching history online or with online supplements. Some of these, like Alex Zukas' "Cyberworld: Teaching World History on the World Wide Web," are not concerned with reading comprehension because they provide most reading materials in printed form and believe that "[b]eing in an online course should not discourage students from going to the library."2 More commonly, articles on the problems posed by the introduction of technology to the classroom have more to do with mastering interactive or instructional software than with student's ability to read the material, which may merely be assumed. This is evident in articles by Julian L. DelGaudio in The History Teacher, Margaret E. Newell in The Journal of American History, and Ralph Mason and Denis Hlynka in Educational Technology.3 Still other works have focused on the higher-level meanings of hyperlinked media, the incorporation of readily-accessible primary documents from digital sources, and generational issues of media- and technology-savvy students. In general, these works skip over the more plebian concerns of a digital document's physical and psychological properties which combine to determine its "readability." |
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The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to the issue of reading comprehension in teaching history with technology, to demonstrate the importance of the readability issue as reported in surveys of undergraduate students, and to highlight some relevant work from other disciplines. Our survey of undergraduate attitudes about readability and the citation of work by other disciplines on the topic should emphasize, by way of contrast, the very lack of interest displayed in the literatures of historical pedagogy and technology enhanced learning. |
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Reading Comprehension, Readability, and Text On Screen | |
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It is worth noting that from the beginning of the PC revolution computer researchers found readability to be a major issue in facilitating human/computer interaction. Researchers Carol Bergfield Mills and Linda J. Weldon note, "The readability of text from computer screens is an issue that has increased in importance with the increasing frequency and range of computer screen use." They go on to define readability as "the ease with which the meaning of text can be comprehended," as distinguished from legibility which "refers to the ease of identification of text items."4 In general, early researchers noticed slower reading rates or an inability to perceive proofreading errors on screen as compared to print, but were not able to correlate this with reading comprehension. One article notes that "it may be that tests of comprehension are simply not sensitive enough to detect differences between paper and screen presentation." Despite this, many researchers observed that satisfaction with reading materials is dependent upon the "psychophysical properties" of the medium.5 |
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These "psychophysical properties" have been enumerated by Wilfred J. Hansen and Christina Haas as "paper size, tangibility, responsiveness, legibility, sense of text, directness and engagement"—referring to the various components of a text which may affect the quality or speed of reading.6 The presence or absence of these properties in a text, whether online or in physical form, may determine how well readers are able to utilize such documents. In the words of one study, these qualities "allow readers to deepen their understanding of the text, extract a sense of its structure, create a plan for writing, cross-refer to other documents, and interleave reading and writing," all of which would seem to be important for the project of teaching history.7 |
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History educators have also discussed the problem of computer reading comprehension, though not as avidly as might be expected. One of the few comments in works related directly to history can be found in Alex Zukas' article on teaching world history, which mentions in passing that "it took students longer than I expected to read material on a monitor."8 Throughout the recently published History.edu: Essays on Teaching with Technology, educators grapple with the promises and pitfalls of teaching with technology, but never explicitly mention online reading comprehension as a concern, even though the various authors deal with a wide range of instructional technology projects, goals, methods and criticism.9 |
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Recent articles from the pages of The History Teacher emphasize both the wide variety and implications of digital literacy. John K. Lee, for example, has offered a summary of digital projects in "Digital History in the History/Social Studies Classroom," arguing that digital resources have four advantages over their printed versions: their search-ability, their ability to be manipulated "in ways that enhance the document's usability," the opportunity they present for the exploration of "alternative representations of the findings," and their ability to be constantly reorganized to fit the conceptual needs of students or researchers. David Trask has applied media theory to a new generation of digitally literate students in "Did the Sans-Coulottes Wear Nikes? The Impact of Electronic Media on the Understanding and Teaching of History," arguing that historians must work hard to keep in touch with the fast-developing worldviews of technology savvy students. Articles like these show the ever-expanding boundaries of digital resources for history instructors, but rarely—if ever—turn to the physical realities of teaching with web-based documents. In fact, the vast increase in online education or paperless library projects has not been matched by research into the specific effects of reading comprehension from non-print sources.10 |
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Though history teachers may not have directly confronted the implications of online comprehension, educational researchers have been studying the problem ever since the introduction of personal computers to the classroom in the early 1980s. However, their results are generally inconclusive. For example, Frank H. Heppner (and others) have reported "reading performance on a standardized test is better when the text is displayed in print, rather than on a computer display screen."11 But Shirley C. Feldman and Marian C. Fish report little or no difference in their analysis, with the advantage going to onscreen text: "In the high ability eighth grade sample, results for media and reader characteristics (interest and experience) showed no significant differences for any variable. In the high school sample, however, the microcomputer group fared significantly better than the print group on comprehension."12 Other researchers found that while adults had more problems reading from screen than from print, ten groups of younger readers had no significant problem with either format: "The finding of no statistically significant differences in reading rate for any of the 10 groups conflicts with most of the findings from adult reading rate, suggesting that reading level might be a factor affecting reading rate from electronic screens or paper."13 More recently, but with similar results, Leonard W. Poon and Bonnie J. F. Meyer found that "Older adults' comprehension was most efficient with print, younger subjects' with computer."14 |
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This last finding may support the generational observations offered by David Trask, who notes that while historians have existed in a predictable world of linearly-constructed print-based documents, "Students do not live in this world. It is electronic media that are shaping student understanding of some of the foundational notions of significance, sequence, institutions, and human agency." Trask anecdotally suggests that students who are surrounded by electronic media are not only shaped by it, but become active and successful manipulators of the electronic media and proficient users of non-print sources. Furthermore, he argues, this world-view should probably not be seen by instructors as evidence of a generational deficiency, but rather as evidence of an alternative construction of linearity, space-time, historical causation, and personality formation. We might therefore speculate that students who are successful consumers and creators of digital media might be quite willing to accept reading assignments in digital format, or at least that complaints of this generation of students when presented with digital resources might be ameliorated in time by an increasingly digital-media-savvy general population.15 |
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Problems with reading from a screen have also been studied by the corporate world, where competition to create a replacement for the bound book is ongoing. Corporate research and development has likewise focused on the issue of readability, determining that electronic books must incorporate new technology in order to be accepted by the market at large. This research direction would indicate that consumers are judging current technology as insufficiently advanced to use for reading extended passages of text. Subash Gandhi has described the battle to provide readable electronic text in "E-Books—The Future of Reading and Ultimate Book Publishing," outlining various companies' attempts to create better stand-alone e-book devices or software to improve text legibility and hence readability on existing personal computers. Developments include (at least) two competing methods of making text more readable by blurring the harsh, jagged boundaries of the black-on-white onscreen text with the addition of shades of gray (a feature known as "antialiasing"). Both Microsoft's XP operating system and Apple's OS X include revolutionary attempts to address this problem, though the operating systems use different methods to achieve similar results (Microsoft's is known as ClearType while Apple uses a graphics rendering system called Quartz, a method based on the Adobe Corporation's portable document format). Despite these current advances, Gandhi concludes his article by noting, "the ultimate success of e-books depends upon a psychological factor, that is 'how comfortable people are with the idea of reading a textbook or a fiction in their beds.'"16 |
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Following Gandhi's logic, we can surmise that since no electronic text or e-book form has been a wild success commercially, that no corporation has succeeded thus far in producing an e-book format which overcomes these physical or psychological hurdles. This conclusion should give pause to any educator considering large online reading assignments. But it was not a factor in considering the development of our technology-enhanced World History course at Carnegie Mellon University. This was not only because almost no mention had been made of the phenomenon in the literature of historical pedagogy, but also because so many of our students seemed to be technophiles themselves. After all, we were on a campus ranked the "Most Wired" in the nation for the last two years running.17 Surely, we thought, students would prefer getting their reading assignments online to any other option. |
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The Course | |
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The "Introduction to World History" course has been the flagship undergraduate course in Carnegie Mellon University's Department of History for nearly twenty years, enrolling between five and seven hundred students from every college each semester.18 Over the spring and summer of the year 2000, faculty members from the Department of History worked on a new design for the course, moving from one based on a textbook and a printed document collection to a more modular design with five monographs or novels supplemented by short, document-based reading assignments. When this plan was implemented during the Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 semesters, students read a large proportion (more than half) of their assigned course materials from a web site, and the rest from physical texts. Materials on the web site were either written specially for the course by instructors or were historical documents whose copyright was in the public domain. In effect, we replaced a physical textbook with a modular, dynamic, web-based text specifically designed for the course. |
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Instructors decided to use web-based readings for several reasons, the first being ease of use. Additional readings could be added to the large lecture course without the logistical issues of locating or photocopying materials for 600–700 students. Because the course would be taught by first-time instructors we anticipated that they might wish to add or subtract reading materials on short notice. Second, a great variety of articles of varying length could be added, custom-tailoring a set of readings to the course. Third, putting materials on the web would also avoid the complexity of commissioning a "course pack" of photocopied materials for sale at the campus bookstore, which cost an inordinate amount and took time to negotiate with the bookstore bureaucracy. Fourth, as the new course design was intended to be "modular" (changing as new professors taught it each semester), the web site could easily reflect this circumstance. |
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The new web site used in the course continued some functions of the existing web site which had been used to provide online access to a course syllabus, offer updated study questions for papers and exams, and instructions for contacting teaching assistants. The redesigned site also added several entirely new functions: Each day of lecture or discussion was accompanied on the web site by a set of assigned articles, images, and maps. Images from the "gallery" section of this web site could be projected on the screen in the lecture portion of the course, illustrating the lectures in real time. Professors could also occasionally project and point out specific instructions in the syllabus, portions of the reading text, or study questions, thus making the projection system and web site a daily part of the course. |
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Instructors and faculty members did not settle on a total technological remake of the course without reservations. We had logistical and bureaucratic questions: Who would be assigned the actual web design? Who was responsible for server maintenance? How would they be paid? How could we maintain stability when technologically proficient instructors and graduate students moved on? Beyond these familiar concerns were valid questions about the pedagogical utility of hypertext readings. Our concerns were supported by reports pointing out the pitfalls of experimenting with new technology. For example, we were galvanized by this observation from Roy Rosenzweig: "Historians know all too well that new technologies often bring with them unrealizable utopian visions."19 |
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Despite these concerns, the instructors and graduate assistants for the course eventually created the largest instructional website ever designed in our department, and it subsequently became the most-accessed website on Carnegie Mellon University's primary web server. The site itself was made up of 121 separate PDF files representing several hundred pages of web-based reading and 72 HTML files with thousands of internal links and hundreds of images. There were 1,365 total files in all, filling several hundred megabytes of space on the web server. |
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Findings: Online Surveys in Fall 2000 and Spring 2001 | |
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In the last few weeks of the first semester (Fall 2000) of the newly-designed course, 76 students of the 612 registered for the course filled out a voluntary, online survey about the course. In a follow-up during the Spring 2001 semester, 30 out of 350 students responded to the same online survey. The number of responses to these surveys did not offer us a statistically significant sample of the opinions of the student population. However, they caused a great deal of interest because students expressed a surprising concern about web-based readings and prompted the creation of a third, paper-based survey in the Fall of 2001.20 |
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In the first online survey, a full sixty-eight percent of respondents indicated that they printed out all of their readings rather than read them online.21 This was a surprising response given the length of all of the online readings, which could result in several hundred pages of printed text, depending on the printer settings of the student's internet browser. This result seemed to be the root cause of a number of the rest of students' responses characterizing their experience with online course materials. |
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When given three choices of formats to receive their reading materials (online, book, or packet), students expressed a preference for a packet. It should be stressed that the results of this section of the survey showed no real differences: The mean and median numbers for online (2.9 and 3) only narrowly differed from the results for those preferring packets (2.8 and 3). When explaining their decision, students chose readability. The second explanation was ease of use, followed (distantly) by cost. Student's responses to the second survey in the spring 2001 semester indicated similar preferences.22 |
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Qualitative responses on the surveys helped us understand how students interpreted the term readability, which seems to be important in interpreting their quantitative responses. While there were many types of responses, some laudatory and some critical of the movement to web-based readings, many students in the first survey when asked if they thought the online materials were "easily readable in their online format," noted fatigue from reading online materials. Their explanations varied: "If printed it is okay, but I suffer from eyestrain if I read documents online," "it's not possible to take notes on an online copy of a reading," "Eye Strain," "it is hard to read anything that is on a computer screen," "the glare of the screen is bad for my eyes and it is too easy to lose my place while reading," "if you've been staring at a computer screen for more than a couple hours at a time...you start to go blind. It's hard to read a 10 page paper online." |
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Beyond the physical limitations of online reading, students also gave evidence of some sort of cognitive unease with online materials, noting that "It felt too jumbled together, and massive...kinda intimidating," "it has no visual structure which would make it easier to comprehend, digest, and remember," "they [readings] are tedious because they are not divided up into different links so the whole task of reading each assignment looks intimidating and it is hard to gauge how long it will take to read each assignment," "I prefer something you can hold or take somewhere convenient," and "It was horrid, PLEASE use books for the readings. So much more tangible." |
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Students responding to the second survey in the spring of 2001 voiced similar concerns. For example, one noted: "For some reason it is just harder to concentrate on what I am reading when looking at a computer screen. [I have a] tendancy to skim things," or, another writing that it was "Very tiring to read long selection on a computer screen," or once again, "Especially for longer readings, it is not comfortable to read the materials online." |
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These responses seem to point to a conceptual inability to master online materials without physical or visual cues—different pages, location of information on a page, physical size of a reading assignment, and portability. In particular, the comments about "jumbled" and "confusing" online readings are indicative of difficulty in comprehending online materials. |
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Findings: Paper-Based Survey (Fall 2001) | |
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These voluntary online surveys of student sentiment, though qualitatively fascinating, weren't all that quantitatively significant, so the third survey was mandatory, in-class and on paper, with 318 responses received from one of the course's two lecture sections (there were, at that time, 478 students registered for that one section, though it seems from the survey results that many were missing from the lecture section on that day). The students who filled out this survey indicated a preference for receiving their reading materials in printed form, with sixty-four percent choosing an option indicating printed materials and the rest preferring online sources.23 Responses to other questions helped explain this preference for printed materials. Students ranked "readability" slightly above all other concerns, including "usability," "ease of access" and "cost."24 Almost all respondents indicated that they printed out the online materials rather than reading from the screen, and the average student responded that they found reading from a screen to be "difficult."25 |
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A follow-up question on the survey asked students to explain why they found reading online to be "difficult." Again, the qualitative responses here serve to illuminate the statistics. Students wrote, "the screen hurts my eyes," "hurts eyes after prolonged reading," and "Just easier to read without glare from screen." Many of the students became distracted when reading online: "[Be]cause you can't make notes and usually there's too many distractions to read it effectively," "Too many distractions on computer (ie instant messaging, email)," "Not difficult, but I find I get distracted very easily with my computer screen in front of me." "Can't concentrate on computer monitor," and "confusing to read." Many students zeroed in on the physicality, or lack thereof: "I have always found that I absorb materials more quickly and better from a hard copy than online, I'm not really sure why," "its not tangible, some issues with that," "it's hard to know where you are," and "I find it easier to have something in my hand. I often lose my place looking at the screen and scrolling." |
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The Blinding Flash of the Obvious | |
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By narrow margins, the students surveyed preferred receiving materials in packet or book form to online versions. Many students still were very supportive of web-based materials in general, but they offered considerable objections to the online materials if they exceeded a certain length. Many preferred the option of receiving assignments in two formats—online, and as a part of course packets. In making these preferences known, students seemed to be very concerned about the "readability" of materials. It seems that some of these responses contradict early hypotheses that students are more likely to read online materials, since the issue of readability would act to counterbalance the ease of access to online materials. |
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We did not expect the majority of our students to print out the materials before reading them, but since they reacted so disagreeably to reading from the screen, it makes sense that a majority in all of the surveys indicated that students printed out their materials either from their own printers, or more likely from "computing cluster" printers made available by the University. In effect, our class transferred the costs of making course materials available from the department budget to the computing clusters and the students. This type of transition is quite likely being felt in institutional budgets across the nation. |
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This, then, is the blinding flash of the obvious: it is more difficult to read text from a screen than from print. Student's qualitative responses to the survey suggest not only eyestrain and a limited capacity to concentrate on extended readings, but also confusion and limited comprehension, at least partially caused by the nature of online readings. It is not likely that the student's confusion represents inexperience with computers or web-based resources, because the university is widely regarded as one of the most "wired" in the nation and attracts some of the most technologically proficient students in the world. Rather, it seems that students have a mental unease with reading and comprehending online materials, at least in large quantities. |
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As a result of these observations, and as a part of the slow transition of a course that depended on a new primary instructor every year, we altered the number and delivery of web-based reading materials. First, we moved from HTML text to PDF versions of the HTML text, and finally to PDF images of the original document. Translated into English, this means that we originally typed the documents directly into a text file that was displayed in the student's web browser. As a partial response to students who complained of getting "lost" in the readings, we chose to create "portable" image documents from those text files, already formatted for printing. Finally we chose to return to the original document, and create an image document from that source. The transition to Adobe Corporation's "PDF" or portable document format allowed us to make certain that all students were reading the documents in the same physical format, with the same page numbers, layout, and page design. This allowed faculty, students and TA's to literally "be on the same page" when discussing a document, and cut down on the necessity to type in or edit vast chunks of text. Our second change in the delivery of reading materials involved a vast decrease in the number of web-based readings along with a substitution of longer, single documents for collections of multiple document excerpts on a given day. Both of these measures were again in response to student's complaints about getting "lost" in a reading assignment. |
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The number of students printing out readings that we had thought could be managed online had not only surprised us but had caused traffic jams in the campus computing clusters. (Laser printers can take quite some time to print out the sometimes-large PDF files.) Even with the changes we have made in web materials and assignments, future versions of the course may have to reconsider the intent and benefits of web-based reading assignments. Until that time, the best practices that we could recommend to instructors considering the use of web-based readings would be: 1) include the use of PDF file format for visual cues and for uniformity of reproduction, 2) offer web-based readings along with an alternate course packet to encourage the widest possible rate of reading completion, and 3) avoid the temptation to add reading materials to the web site at the last minute, because this prompts a maddening rush on campus printing resources. |
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Conclusion | |
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This survey of technologically proficient undergraduates in an introductory world history course at Carnegie Mellon University reveals both a general student approval of web-enabled course materials and a deeply held concern about the "readability" of onscreen materials. Although this issue has been discussed in computer science and educational research literature for decades, historians have not considered the issue fully in developing their own approaches to online instruction or technology-enhanced learning. Even though the computer industry is working to improve the legibility and readability of text as presented on a screen, the technological fixes could take quite some time to develop, and may still present qualitative differences in the reading experience which will affect student comprehension, concentration and comfort. This consideration should not discourage instructors from using the positive aspects of technology in the classroom, but should cause them to structure more effective reading assignments. Any factor which may serve to encourage or to discourage rates of student reading and comprehension should be a central concern for historians in particular, since our courses depend almost exclusively on a student's grasp of written documents. |
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Reading online course materials may be a part of most instruction by the end of this century. Or it may not. Even Subash Gandhi, who otherwise appears very excited by instructional technology, notes, "In digital culture, people search, surf, and browse but they don't call it 'reading.'"26 This sentiment is echoed by James Gleick, who observes in his book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything: |
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There is friction implied by opening, folding, and turning the pages of a newspaper; or by choosing a book, cracking its spine, slitting its pages, adjusting the lamp, placing the bookmark; and this time-consuming frippery served an unintended purpose. Having made the investment, people found it natural to devote relatively large chunks of time to the actual reading. In contrast, the Web facilitates information consumption much as the remote control facilitated television watching. Reading on-line becomes another form of channel-flipping.27 | |
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When students refer to online reading assignments as "jumbled," "confusing" or "tedious;" when they argue for "tangible" or portable readings; when they complain about eyestrain or losing their place in the text, they may be expressing the quality defined by researchers as a "psychophysical" unease resulting in lowered rates of comprehension. When presented with long reading assignments online, students may be "surfing" or "browsing" or "channel-flipping" rather than actually reading. In the coming decades, progress in technology or culture may allow readers to comprehend digital text just as easily as they understand printed text. Until that point, however, instructors should consider the unintended effects of the medium during course design. Undergraduate writers are not the only ones who may draw insight from a blinding flash of the obvious. |
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Notes
1. This survey was conducted with the support of the primary instructors, Professor Mary Lindemann (F00 and F01) and Professor Donna Harsch (S01 and S02). Dr. Julia Deems and Dr. Anne Fay of Carnegie Mellon's Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and John Robertson were helpful in designing and interpreting the surveys. This report was partially funded by the Humanities Instructional Technology grant from the Carnegie Mellon Office of Technology for Education. The author wishes to thank all of these individuals and organizations. A previous paper based on this research was presented at the 2002 meeting of the Florida Conference of Historians.
2. Alex Zukas, "Cyberworld: Teaching World History on the World Wide Web" in The History Teacher Vol 32, No. 4 (August 1999), p. 515.
3. See Julian L. DelGaudio, "Should Historians Become Programmers? Limitations and Possibilities of Computer-Assisted Instruction in the United States History Survey" in The History Teacher, Vol. 33, No 1 (November 1999) pp. 67–78; Margaret E. Newell, "Subterranean Electronic Blues; or, How a former Technophobe Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Multimedia" in The Journal of American History, Vol 83, No. 4 (March 1997), pp. 1346–1352; and Ralph Mason and Denis Hlynka, "'PowerPoint' in the Classroom: Where is the Power?/What is the Point?" in Educational Technology Vol 38, No. 5 (September–October 1998), pp. 42–48.
4. Carol Bergfeld Mills and Linda J. Weldon, "Reading Text from Computer Screens," in ACM Computing Surveys Vol. 19, No. 4 (December 1987) pp. 329 and 331.
5. Mills and Weldon, 332–336. Computer researchers offer contradictory results of comparative reading studies: J.D. Gould, "Why Reading was Slower from CRT than From Paper?" Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery, (1987) pp. 7–11; Y. Waern and C. Rollenhagen, "Reading Text from Visual Display Units (VDUs)" in International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 18 (1983), 441–465; J.W. Tombaugh, Michael D. Arkin, and Richard F. Dillon, "The Effect of VDU Text-Presentation Rate on Reading Comprehension and Reading Speed" in Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery, (April 1985) pp. 1–6; A. Dillon, "Reading from Paper Versus Screens: A Critical Review of the Empirical Literature." Ergonomics vol. 35 no. 10, (1992), pp. 1297–1326.
6. Wilfred J. Hansen and Christina Haas, "Reading and Writing with Computers: A Framework for Explaining Differences in Performance," in Communications of the ACM Volume 31 No. 9, (September 1988), pp. 1080–1089.
7. Kenton O'Hara & Abigail Sellen, "A Comparison of Reading Paper and On-Line Documents" Conference Paper, ACM CHI 97 (1997) pp. 335–343.
8. Zukas, p. 515.
9. For the discussion which comes closest to the topic of print versus screen, see Arne Solli, "Hypertext 'Papers' on the Web: Students Confront the Linear Tradition" in Dennis A. Trinkle and Scott A. Merriman, Eds., History.edu: Essays on Teaching with Technology. (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), pp. 38–51. Other than that, the term "reading" does not even appear in the book's topical index. There is a brief mention in a book previously edited by Dennis Trinkle: in M. Daniel Price, "Will the Real Revolution Please Stand Up!: Gutenberg, the Computer, and the University," in Writing, Teaching, and Researching History in the Electronic Age, Dennis A. Trinkle, ed. (Armonk, New York: 1998) p. 30.
10. John K. Lee, "Digital History in the History/Social Studies Classroom," The History Teacher vol. 35 , no. 4 (August 2002) pp. 503–517; David Trask, "Did the Sans-Coulouttes Wear Nikes? The Impact of Electronic Media on the Understanding and Teaching of History," The History Teacher vol. 35, No. 4 (August 2002) pp. 473–489.
11. Frank H. Heppner, et al., "Reading Performance on a Standardized Test is Better from Print than from Computer Display." Journal of Reading vol. 28, No. 4, (January 1985) pp. 321–25; c.f. Vivienne Cato, "Reading Screens: Mapping the Labyrinth." Reading Vol. 23, No. 3, (November 1989) pp. 168–78.
12. Shirley C. Feldmann and Marian C. Fish, "Reading Comprehension of High School Students on Print vs. Microcomputer-Generated Text." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (Washington, DC, April 20–24, 1987).
13. Carolyn S. Clausing and Dorren R. Schmitt, "Paper versus CRT—Are Reading Rate and Comprehension Affected?" in Proceedings of Selected Paper Presentations at the Convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (Iowa, 1990).
14. Leonard W. Poon and Bonnie J.F. Meyer, "Age Differences in Efficiency of Reading Comprehension from Printed versus Computer-Displayed Text" in Educational Gerontology Vol. 23, No. 8 (December 1997) pp. 789–807.
15. Trask, 473.
16. Subash Gandhi, "E-Books—The Future of Reading and Ultimate Book Publishing" in Journal of Educational Technology Systems, Vol. 29, No. 1, (2000–2001), p. 64.
17. "Wired Colleges 2001," Yahoo! Internet Life, (October 2001) pp. 101–102.
18. This previous version of the course is profiled in Montserrat Marti Miller and Peter N. Stearns, "Applying Cognitive Learning Approaches in History Teaching: An Experiment in a World History Course," The History Teacher 28 (February 1995): 183–204.
19. Roy Rosenzweig, "'So, What's Next for Clio?': CD-ROM and Historians." The Journal of American History, 81:4 (March 1995): 1621–1640.
20. The complete text of all three surveys, along with responses, is available online at http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~jll2/HistoryTeacher/
21. On this question, 8% of all respondents indicated that they print and read, 36% print read and keep, 24% print read and take notes, 24% read online and 8% other. Actual responses were 6, 28, 18, 18, 6.
22. Survey respondents again indicated that they printed reading assignments before reading them, this semester by a 9:1 ratio. Of the 29 students who answered this question on the survey (one student abstaining for some reason), 8 indicated that they "print and read" the assignments from the web site, 14 reported that they "print read and keep" the assignments, and 4 replied that they "print, read and take notes on" the text. Only 3 of the respondents indicated that they had read the assignments "online."
23. Online = 113, book = 120, packet =85, library reserve = 0, n=318. I find it quite remarkable that none of the students surveyed indicted a preference to receive their reading materials on reserve in the library. In fact, you could say that this response was the most statistically significant of the entire survey—something for librarians and course designers to keep in mind.
24. Question 5 used a spectrum response format: for each of the four possible explanations of preference, there was a spectrum of five possible responses, "none, very little, some, a lot, completely," which were given values from 1 to 5. Here is the question and the totaled responses: "How much of your stated preference for the format of course materials [online, books, or photocopies] is based on: Cost [879] Ease of Access [1135] Readability [1170] Usability [1103]."
25. Question 3, which asked about student's practice in reading the materials, used a similar spectrum response, 1–5, "never, rarely, sometimes, often, always." The question reads: "When reading course material which is made available online, how often do you: Read the material online without printing it out [693]; read the material online and also keep a printed version [700]; print out the material to read it, and keep a printed version [1174]; print out the material to read it, but don't keep a printed version [519]; print out the material to read it and keep it to take notes on [1043]." Question 6 asked the student to complete the sentence: "The level of difficulty in reading the course web materials online (i.e., from the screen, not printing them out) is:" with the possible responses, ranked 1 through 5, "Very Difficult, Difficult, Reasonable, Pretty Easy, Very Easy". The median response was 2, the average was 2.276.
26. Gandhi, Ibid.
27. James Gleick, Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. (New York: Pantheon, 1999) pp. 71–72.
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