If you’re reading this on a screen, your brain is working harder than if you were reading it in print. This is due to a phenomenon called screen inferiority, which has been shown to diminish reading comprehension significantly, equivalent to months of learning loss (Clinton, 2019). It is caused by several factors:
- Visual strain from screen glare and pixelated text, which increases cognitive load.
- Digital distractions like pop-ups and hyperlinks that fracture attention—even when ignored—because resisting them consumes cognitive bandwidth.
- Lack of semantic anchors. Screens lack spatial cues that help us to recall on what page and location we’ve read something, which makes recall and comprehension harder.
- Digital fatigue. Screen reading taxes the brain, prompting skimming over deep reading (Pettoello-Mantovani et al., 2025).
Recent studies with students illustrate these effects. Researcher Yu-Cin Jian tracked eye movements of 64 Taiwanese college students randomly assigned to read a six-page science article in digital or print (Jian, 2022). Screen readers took longer to read the article and rarely reread it—a key to comprehension. In contrast, print readers skimmed first, then read and reread more carefully and ultimately, demonstrated greater comprehension.
In a different study, Keita Umejima and colleagues scanned the brains of 25 Japanese college students as they alternated between reading a complex narrative in print and on screen (Umejima et al., 2026). When reading on a screen, brain activity spiked in students’ left frontal lobes used for language processing and dipped in their right frontal lobes used for meaning making. The opposite pattern occurred in print, which suggests that print reading allowed students’ brains to direct less energy to reading and more to processing, which in turn, led to better comprehension.
So, what might educators do with these findings? Start with assessing how much and what students are reading on screens. The more complex the content, the better suited it is for print.
If screens are unavoidable, find ways to configure them to provide the semantic anchors of text—for example, creating pages that turn.
Finally, teach students to overcome their brains’ tendency to skim and scroll on screens by slowing down and engaging in more reflective reading and rereading. Which is exactly what you may decide to do if you’ve finished reading this on a screen.
