April 2025
Key Takeaways:
- Effective reading on the internet requires additional skills than linear text reading
- How you search may be even more important than where you go
Digital reading is crucial for 21st century students to acquire. Digital reading requires students to be adaptable to their task and text, aware of their learning, and to set learning goals and examine their texts through these goals. Despite the growing importance of digital reading, the skills specific to this type of reading are missing in literacy curricula, partially because it is still unclear what skills create strong digital readers.
To identify skills that bolster students' digital reading abilities, LRDC researcher Scott Fraundorf and colleagues* conducted a study to understand what factors in web navigation predicted student success in digital reading. The researchers studied 257 high school students' web navigation to examine what individual differences lead to successful learning.
They found that the navigation behavior that best predicted learning and comprehension, even more than finding topic-specific sites, was creating topic-specific search queries that go beyond broad relevance to include a tight alignment to the topic. Students' engagement in this type of querying activity was predicted by individual differences in metacognition, suggesting that monitoring comprehension of the topic plays a role in the behavior.
These results suggest that educators may be able to improve digital reading by encouraging students to reflect on their search queries, specifically advising students to consider the scope of the context for learning and how the information they are looking up serves the purpose of the task. Finally, educators may be able to improve student performance in this domain by focusing not just on what is important for digital literacy, but also on why it is important and needs to be honed as its own skill.
Read the full article at Learning and Individual Differences.
Norberg, K.A., Han, H., Cho, BY., & Fraundorf, S. H. (2025). Getting there is half the journey: An exploration of high schoolers' individual differences and navigation strategies during internet-based digital reading. Learning and Individual Differences.
Researchers:
Kole Norberg, formerly Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) and Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh; currently Carnegie Learning, Pittsburgh, PA
Hyeju Han, formerly Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) and Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh; currently National Louis University, Chicago, IL
Byeong-Cho, formerly Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) and Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh; currently Hanyang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Scott Fraundorf, Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC), and Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh
Written by Amber Eschrich
