الملخص الإنجليزي
Mirroring the worldwide debates on the new reality of digital reading and how it affects reading comprehension and causes change in information retention, and long term learning, this study explores the impacts of both reading modes (digital vs printed) upon the level of reading comprehension of university students (N=181) in the informative textual reading. Drawn upon the scientific literature, a conceptual framework was built up by a concept of reading as a human-technology interaction'. The conceptual framework combines paradigms of assessment on cognition, psychological and physiological dimensions that reflects the surface of who, what and how the comprehension process might be affected. To conduct the assessment, a quasi-experimental within-subjects design was employed. The procedure of the quasi-experiment consisted of two phases: printed reading phase and digital reading phase with a pre-procedure task for filling reading preference survey. Each phase had three tasks: reading task, reading comprehension test task, and post-assessment survey to measure reader's interaction during the reading task. The key findings of the analysis, revealed that more than half of the participants still have an inclination to printed reading modes. The second analysis explored the impacts on digital text comprehension considering preference as a moderator variable. The result indicated that, reading speed, reader's attention, reading workload, and the embodiment interaction are significant predictors accounted for (22%) on reading comprehension variance. However, the results of this study refute the commonly perceived negative impact that digital reading impose on reading comprehension since the results affirmed insignificant influence on reading comprehension compared to printed reading. This study is of importance for any higher education institution since it provides practitioners and decision makers with a sense of a distinct progression in using digital reading technologies in educational context. Such progression, lies in adoption of e-texts in their pursuit to cut costs and increase education efficiency and effectiveness.
