Getty Images Stock Photo Novelist Philip Roth told an interviewer: The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete—beginning—with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. Roth also stated that reading a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, attentiveness, and devotion to reading. It’s hard to find a significant number of people who possess those qualities.  Obviously, Roth was contrasting reading for entertainment with watching movies, sitcoms, or YouTube videos. Roth didn’t speculate on how the screen affected learning to read. People expected the digital age to improve children’s access to reading materials, boost America’s literacy rate, and generate more lifelong readers. Then we learned there was a “digital divide.” The term “digital divide” gained traction in the late 1990s. It described the gap between people with access to technology, the internet, and digital literacy training and those without. According to experts, those on the “have not” side of the digital divide will have lower school performance and fewer career possibilities, which will, in the long run, compound existing racial and class inequalities.  To ensure that rural and urban students did not fall behind their suburban counterparts, there was a well-intentioned push during the first decade of the twenty-first century to get as many students in front of as many screens as possible. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic forced school closings across the country. Students continued their studies remotely, with schools providing laptops and tablets. During this time, many parents saw their children’s classroom lessons for the first time and objected to what they perceived as left-wing indoctrination, sparking a new conflict in the culture war. Meanwhile, reading scores were declining across the country. However, educators attributed these poor scores to the school closures, with the belief that reading scores would increase once the schools resumed regular operations.  Another factor might have contributed to these low reading test scores, but it received little attention. In 2023, education journalist Holly Korbey investigated whether there was a distinction between reading from printed books and reading on screens. Korbey explained in the MIT Technology Review, “Researchers who study young readers’ brains and behaviors are eager to understand exactly where tech serves kids’ progress in reading and where it may stand in the way … However, educators who are more dependent than ever on digital technology to aid learning in general often have little or no guidance on how to balance screens and paper books for beginning readers accustomed to toggling between the two. In a lot of ways, each teacher is winging it.” While teachers “winging it” may sound troublesome, problems may simply arise from reading on screens. According to studies, young readers benefit more from reading print texts than digital ones. Researchers stated, “Digital texts can be useful for teaching certain foundational skills, but they do not equally develop cognitive patience and slower, deeper processes in the brain that serve comprehension, retention, and focus.” Educational psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the “screen inferiority effect.” However, the researchers have yet to determine the exact reasons for this phenomenon, leading many to disregard these studies and dismiss the researchers as anti-technology and old-fashioned. Despite the Skeptics, Korbey still wrote, “Once children have learned to decode words, research on how they comprehend texts encountered on screens and paper gets a little more decisive. Experts say that young readers need to be reading alongside adults—getting feedback, asking questions, and looking at pictures together. All this helps them build the vocabulary and knowledge to understand what they’re reading. Screens often do a poor job of replicating this human-to-human interaction, and scientists say that the “reading circuits” in children’s brains develop differently when the young learners are glued to a screen. Studies on the inner workings of the brain confirm the idea that human interaction helps develop beginning readers’ capacity for understanding. But they suggest that reading paper books is also associated with progress. In one study, researchers found that 3- and 4-year-old children had more activation in language regions of the brain when they read a book with an adult like a parent than when they listened to an audiobook or read from a digital app. When they read on an iPad, activation was lowest of all. In another study, MRI scans of 8- to 12-year-olds showed stronger reading circuits in those who spent more time reading paper books than those who spent their time on screens.” Roth was mistaken; books can compete with the screen.          The post J. Pharoah Doss: Books can’t compete with the screen? appeared first on Atlanta Daily World.