A decade ago, the research was dominated by papers demonstrating that students (generally in higher education) did not retain as much information from reading digital non-fiction as they did print. Is the broadening of research in this field to examine fiction as well as non-fiction, and to look at other factors including distractibility making a difference to how we interpret this concern?

The research seems to be coming more into balance as the years go on. Studies that look at retention of information are filtering down from being exclusive to higher education cohorts to more conducted in the secondary and primary spaces. The younger the student, it seems, the more the impact of distractibility is a focus. But is this due to the nature of the text? Few pieces of digital literature for readers beyond the primary years (with the exception of story-driven games) feature interactive elements (more’s the pity – can you imagine the amazing creation that would be an interactive digilit version of Nick Bantok’s epistolary masterpiece Griffin & Sabine?).

Rather than considering this conundrum from a deficit model of thinking (that is to say, what makes digital literature more or less effective), I’d like to reframe it to consider our role as teacher librarians in bridging the gap between the two modes of input for our students.

We teach our students to read primarily with print books – left to right, front to back, top to bottom. How to turn the pages, how to open and close the book cover. We teach them to look for punctuation and text effects such as bolding, italicising, or underlining that will give them a clue as to what they need to do with it to demonstrate fluency. We teach them to look at the illustrations for extra information, to assist in developing comprehension. And after all of that, they know how to use a book.

But what features are different on a piece of digital literature? Are we explicitly teaching students how to use these? What if we were to use digital literature as the preferred format for teaching students to read from the start? Would students ‘know’ what to do with them at an earlier age? How would that impact the data regarding retention and engagement in, say, ten years from now?

Food for thought!