The digital deficit, they suggest, isn't a result of the medium as such but rather of a failure of self-knowledge and self-control: we don't realize that digital comprehension may take just as much time as reading a book.
This conflates Internet skills and digital comprehension, because the latter is defined in terms of complex search and comprehension scenarios.
With primary and high school students, printed comprehension ability, basic Internet skills, and navigation behavior contributed to digital comprehension.
Julie Coiro, who studies digital reading comprehension in elementary- and middle-school students at the University of Rhode Island, has found that good reading in print doesn't necessarily translate to good reading on-screen.
As stated above, studies of complex digital text comprehension have employed complex digital tasks requiring search, evaluation and integration.
A similarly complex digital text comprehension construct has been incorporated since 2009 in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA; OECD, 2009; OECD, 2011).
Hypertext and digital text comprehension studies found that previous knowledge, working memory (Amadieu & Salmerón, 2014; Burin, Kahan, Irrazabal, & Saux, 2013) and operational and navigation skills (Fajardo et al., 2016; Hahnel et al., 2016; OECD, 2011) contribute to digital text comprehension, and the effect of Internet skills depends on level of previous knowledge and working memory capacity.
As a result, the digital text comprehension construct is defined by a mix of operational computer skills, knowledge of the Internet environment, search and navigation skills, text integration and comprehension abilities, information evaluation, communication, and problem solving.
They found that digital reading comprehension was directly related to unique variance provided by linear reading ability, basic computer skills, and information evaluation, and that navigation mediated the influence of the first two abilities and skills.
Complex dynamic digital text comprehension scenarios tested in previous studies comprise diverse websites (for example, social media, government websites, forums or e-mail chains), and tasks vary from finding explicit information, to making global comprehension inferences about content and authors, to expressing opinions.
In a study comparing digital and print comprehension of a short nonfiction text, Rakefet Ackerman and Morris Goldsmith found that students fared equally well on a post-reading multiple-choice test when they were given a fixed amount of time to read, but that their digital performance plummeted when they had to regulate their time themselves.
