Try Reading a Good Old-fashioned Newspaper
Even for people who dear books, finding the opportunity to read can be a claiming. Many, then, rely on audiobooks, a user-friendly culling to erstwhile-fashioned reading. You can listen to the latest bestseller while commuting or cleaning up the house.
But is listening to a volume really the same as reading ane?
"I was a fan of audiobooks, simply I e'er viewed them as cheating," says Beth Rogowsky, an associate professor of education at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania.
For a 2016 written report, Rogowsky put her assumptions to the test. One group in her report listened to sections of Unbroken, a nonfiction book about Globe War 2 past Laura Hillenbrand, while a second grouping read the same parts on an e-reader. She included a 3rd group that both read and listened at the same fourth dimension. Subsequently, everyone took a quiz designed to measure how well they had absorbed the textile. "We establish no significant differences in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading and listening simultaneously," Rogowsky says.
Score ane for audiobooks? Mayhap. But Rogowsky'due south study used e-readers rather than traditional impress books, and there'due south some evidence that reading on a screen reduces learning and comprehension compared to reading from printed text. So information technology's possible that, had her written report pitted traditional books against audiobooks, sometime-school reading might have come out on top.
If you're wondering why printed books may be meliorate than screen-based reading, it may have to exercise with your inability to guess where you are in an electronic volume. "As you lot're reading a narrative, the sequence of events is of import, and knowing where you are in a book helps you build that arc of narrative," says Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the Academy of Virginia and writer of Raising Kids Who Read. While e-readers try to replicate this by telling you lot how much of a book you lot have left, in a percentage or length of time to the cease, this doesn't seem to have the same narrative-orienting event as reading from a traditional volume.
The fact that printed text is anchored to a specific location on a page also seems to assist people remember information technology better than screen-based text, according to more research on the spatial attributes of traditional printed media. All this may be relevant to the audiobook vs. book fence because, like digital screens, audiobooks deny users the spatial cues they would employ while reading from printed text.
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The cocky-directed rhythms associated with reading may as well differentiate books from audiobooks.
"About 10 to 15% of middle movements during reading are actually regressive—meaning [the eyes are] going back and re-checking," Willingham explains. "This happens very quickly, and information technology's sort of seamlessly stitched into the process of reading a sentence." He says this reading quirk nearly certainly bolsters comprehension, and information technology may exist roughly comparable to a listener asking for a speaker to "hold on" or echo something. "Fifty-fifty equally y'all're asking, yous're going over in your mind's ear what the speaker just said," he says. Theoretically, you lot can also intermission or jump back while listening to an audio file. "Only it's more problem," he adds.
Another consideration is that whether we're reading or listening to a text, our minds occasionally wander. Seconds (or minutes) can pass before we snap out of these niggling mental sojourns and refocus our attention, says David Daniel, a professor of psychology at James Madison University and a member of a National University of Sciences projection aimed at agreement how people learn.
If you're reading, it's pretty easy to get back and detect the signal at which you zoned out. It'due south not then easy if yous're listening to a recording, Daniel says. Particularly if yous're grappling with a complicated text, the ability to chop-chop backtrack and re-examine the textile may aid learning, and this is likely easier to do while reading than while listening. "Turning the page of a book also gives you a slight intermission," he says. This brief interruption may create space for your brain to store or savor the information yous're absorbing.
Daniel coauthored a 2010 study that found students who listened to a podcast lesson performed worse on a comprehension quiz than students who read the same lesson on newspaper. "And the podcast group did a lot worse, non a little worse," he says. Compared to the readers, the listeners scored an average of 28% lower on the quiz—almost the departure between an A or a D form, he says.
Interestingly, at the outset of the experiment, almost all the students wanted to exist in the podcast group. "But then right before I gave them the quiz, I asked them again which group they would want to be in, and most of them had changed their minds—they wanted to exist in the reading group," Daniel says. "They knew they hadn't learned as much."
He says it's possible that, with practise, the listeners might be able to make upwardly ground on the readers. "Nosotros get good at what we do, and you could become a better listener if you trained yourself to heed more critically," he says. (The same could be truthful of screen-based reading; some research suggests that people who practice "screen learning" get amend at information technology.)
Merely there may besides be some "structural hurdles" that impede learning from audio material, Daniels says. For one thing, you can't underline or highlight something you hear. And many of the "This is important!" cues that show up in text books—things like bolded words or boxed $.25 of disquisitional info—aren't easily emphasized in audio-based media.
But audiobooks also have some strengths. Man beings have been sharing information orally for tens of thousands of years, Willingham says, while the printed word is a much more recent invention. "When we're reading, we're using parts of the brain that evolved for other purposes, and we're MacGyvering them then they tin can be practical to the cognitive task of reading," he explains. Listeners, on the other paw, tin can derive a lot of information from a speaker'south inflections or intonations. Sarcasm is much more than easily communicated via sound than printed text. And people who hear Shakespeare spoken out loud tend to glean a lot of meaning from the actor's delivery, he adds.
Withal, a final gene may tip the comprehension and retentivity scales firmly in favor of reading, and that's the issue of multitasking. "If you're trying to learn while doing 2 things, yous're not going to larn every bit well," Willingham says. Even activities that y'all can more than or less perform on autopilot—stuff similar driving or doing the dishes—take up enough of your attending to impede learning. "I listen to audiobooks all the time while I'm driving, but I would not try to heed to anything important to my work," he says.
All that said, if y'all're reading or listening for leisure—not for work or written report—the differences betwixt audiobooks and impress books are probably "small potatoes," he adds. "I think there's enormous overlap in comprehension of an audio text compared to comprehension of a print text."
Then go ahead and "cheat." Your volume guild buddies will never know.
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