University Students’ Preferences of Reading from a Printed Paper or a Digital Screen ― A Longitudinal Study

Abstract—Reading mediums have reached a wider range of facilities in the last couple of decades whereas paper has been almost the only choice for a long time. Academically, with the development of electronic learning approaches, students are involved in reading from a digital screen much more than before. The huge corpus of instruction which flows through digital screens arises some questions on students’ preferences and comfort about reading from a digital screen instead of reading from conventional printed papers. The aim of this study is to investigate the preferences of university students for reading from a printed text or from a digital screen in 2008 and 2014 and also to reveal if this preference changes depending on their gender or department. A questionnaire was conducted to 792 students from eight different departments of the faculty of education. Results indicate that, the majority of the students still prefer traditional printed paper instead of digital screen for their reading activities and this preference of them have not changed in 6 years. Furthermore, whereas gender does not play an effective role in this preference, the students’ department may affect their choice.

Index Terms—Digital screen, printed paper, reading preferences, students’ preferences.

Zekeriya Kazanci is with the Çukurova University, Turkey (e-mail: zkazanci@cu.edu.tr).

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Cite: Zekeriya Kazanci, "University Students’ Preferences of Reading from a Printed Paper or a Digital Screen ― A Longitudinal Study," International Journal of Culture and History vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 50-53, 2015.