‘Skim, Dive, Surface’: An Interview with Jenae Cohn
Jenae Cohn
James M. Lang
Over a very short space of human history, our reading habits have changed dramatically. Although a robust culture of printed texts continues, many people do much or even all their reading in digital formats. The same dynamic exists for our students, who might engage with their course readings entirely through documents posted to the learning management system. Educators should be especially interested in how shifts in reading habits can influence learning. The early research on reading-for-learning suggested that when we are reading for deeper learning, print continues to hold an advantage. But as Jenae Cohn argues in Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digitial Reading, reading in digital formats plays such an important part in our students’ lives that we should teach students to do it well, rather than just throwing up our hands and banning digital documents from our teaching. Online reading skills can be taught, and there are even some contexts in which digital reading might prove superior to engaging with a printed text. Cohn’s research and recommendations provide wise guidance for faculty who wish to help their students learn through reading in different formats.
James M. Lang, Ph.D.
Click here to view the video transcript
– I’m with Jenae Cohn, the executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jenae is the author of “Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading”. So Janae, most research on reading for learning has shown an advantage for reading in print, but you want to complicate that story for us. Can you give us a quick overview of your argument?
– Absolutely, Jim. Thanks for asking this question. So, the argument of “Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading” is that we have to really think expansively about reading practices, behaviors, and intentional environments. The studies on reading in different modalities really help us understand that reading in print is really well suited for reading in large, concentrated blocks of time, in sort of situations where you have to, perhaps, recall different facts or information more readily. But there’s a lot of situations where we read where fact recall or understanding where information is on a particular page may not be as important. I think the goal is to be really intentional in why we read, and then to make choices about where and when we read accordingly.
– Okay. So, a lot of faculty sort of defaulting to online reading assignments for lots of good reasons, because reduced cost for students, I have three kids in college right now, and most of their reading assignments are coming in digital forms. A few times in the semester, when would it make sense for like a faculty member to say, I want to stop and ask you to read something on a printed page?
– Sure. There’s a number of situations where faculty may want students to be more mindful of their attentional environment, of how they’re engaging with text in particular. So, I could see reading in print being really useful if, say, a faculty member wants students to really unplug, to not have access to the internet and all of those features at their disposal. And to get to have a moment of just really, again, engaging with the text and the text alone. I could also see engaging with print being useful if the material itself is actually part of the active interpretation as well. So, there’s some texts that a faculty may be assigning where it’s really important for students to see that it’s part of a magazine, or part of a book, or part of a newspaper, right? That material environment may shape, again, these sort of interpretive engagement. I’m also thinking about situations where perhaps the faculty member wants the student to read a poem or a piece of literature where the fixed appearance is really important, or having the text adaptable or muted in some way, excuse me, mutated in some way, as it might on screen, may interfere with the way the text should be understood. This is all to say that faculty, however, should be mindful that students may still need accommodations or ways to access text that aren’t printed. So, if you have a student who, by means of an accommodation, requires their text to be rendered digitally, no matter what, it is really important to honor that accommodation and make sure students do feel included in the reading experience, even if print is not available to them in some capacity. So, for example, if you have students who need a text-to-speech application and they need to listen to something via audio, they may need to engage with a digital device, because the printed page won’t really mean anything to them. So, I would just say that, again, we’ve gotta be sort of understanding of the different needs that students may have, while, again, also designing assignments with attention, not just to the content of what’s on the page, but to the environment in which that content is produced, circulated and received.
– So let’s stay on this question for just a second, and let me flip.
– Sure.
– When would be the times when the faculty member may want to emphasise digital reading, for example? And what kinds of situations in which they would maybe have that be the better way for students to actually engage with the material, like in a digital context or an audio context?
– Sure. So, I think digital reading is great for tasks like reading for research. So, one thing that works really well on screen is the ability to process large amounts of information at once, and be able to curate those pieces either by using online annotation tools, by creating sets of folders or bookmarks to collect lots of pieces of information, and even if you’re just reading one text, to give students the ability to easily cut or copy and paste material to different places and environments to create new patchworks of text or new meaning. That’s a really cool way to engage in digital reading. I also think if you’re wanting students to be thinking multi-modally about text, right? If they’re reading texts that were written online and were intended for online distribution, such as various web texts with embedded images, or links, or videos, that’s going to be more appropriate to read online, because, again, there’s that attention to the environment that’s really pivotal to the active interpretation. Just as, again, maybe a printed material necessitates the reading in that particular space. I would say that for audio too, right? I think it depends, again, on how the text was composed, but it may also depend on what options you want to make available to students who may find it easier to engage with text if they’re listening to it. So, I would just say if you can give students one other option or way to engage with the experience of reading, it usually helps. And I think, as an instructor, the best thing you can really do is make students aware of those options and point out what they get out of the different spaces. Again, with your first question about reading in print, a lot of students and faculty express a preference for print if they’re trying to have a lot of silence, if they’re trying to really have that sort of meditative and focused experience. But many prefer digital texts, again, when they’re trying to access lots of different pieces of information and are trying to engage with diverse sources and resources across different spaces. So, I’d say that pointing out some of those general trends while also giving students room to be agential in how they want to experience the reading is really important for teachers to think about.
– Yeah, it reminds me actually the idea of, what you’re arguing here reminds me of the notion of plus one thinking. And so, that comes from Tom Tobin and Kirsten Behling’s book “Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone”, right? So, you want to have chosen modality, but then have a plus one option. You could do it this way, but you could do this this other way as well, right? And that’s going to accommodate as many learners as possible. So, I really like that idea. So, tell me a little bit about what drove you into sort of doing research on student reading practices and what’s most helpful for your student learning.
– Absolutely. So, my interest in this topic derived from both my own experience as a reader as well as my experiences of teaching writing. So, I have a very distinct memory of my first quarter of graduate school, trying to print every single article I had to read for classes, every single week. I was going through reams of printed paper, I think I had to buy a new ink cartridge from my printer every single week, because I was reading like 500 pages of text a week. And it struck me that it just wasn’t a sustainable way to read. Not only I was a broke grad student at a certain point, I couldn’t afford it, and my department, you’ve probably had this experience, throttled how much we could print per week. So, I had some material constraints, really that impacted what I could do. And I noticed that my students faced those same sets of material constraints for their reading. They weren’t always able to print, not just because of the expense, but because they didn’t always have access to a printer, or they were commuting on the campus, on the bus, and didn’t want to be carrying around reams of paper or stacks of books in their backpacks. I noticed that most students in my class, when they were accessing the reading, they really were just doing it on their laptop most of the time. And so, in my own experience of attempting to adjust my practices to read on screen, and in my experiences of noticing that students were largely reading on screen and struggling with it, seeing my own struggles reflected in the students struggles as well really motivated me to better understand how do we leverage the capacity of reading on screen more meaningfully? How do we make sure that we know what skills we need to develop to do this successfully? What are some ways we can build upon tried and true practices for reading that derive from print-based modalities? And when might the affordances of being on screen give us some new techniques and opportunities to engage with our reading more purposefully, more mindfully?
– Yeah, that’s great. And so, tell me about your reading practices these days, what’s your sort of different kind of modalities that you read in?
– Gosh, I read in so many different modalities all the time. I’m constantly switching and, of course, after writing this book, I’m even more intentional about my decisions. So, I would say that for scholarly reading, when I’m reading for my own research, or I’m reading to improve my own teaching practice, or my faculty development work, I’m exclusively reading online these days. And that’s primarily just because it’s so much easier for me to access diverse authors and texts from different publications and books. Plus I have a really robust note taking and citation management practice now. It actually makes it easier for me to toggle between reading and writing where I’m using a citation manager to keep track of everything I’ve read, I’m using that tool to keep notes and store my annotations, and I can tag and sort the abundance of things I’m reading constantly a lot better on my computer, digitally, than I think I could do with the materials available to me in paper. But I still love reading on paper too, especially for narrative. You can’t see it in this room, but I’ve got a huge wall of books like you, Jim, with all my favorite novels in my other room. So, I still really enjoy my pleasures reading on paper, and I still order my copy of the New Yorker in a print magazine because I love the feeling of just being on my couch on a Sunday, catching up on the news features. So, there’s an emotional dimension to reading that’s still really important to me and that is bound with the material experience of having a book, or having a magazine, that I know a lot of academics probably relate to. But, again, I’m orienting very differently, I’m not really taking notes, I’m not really trying to extract information, I’m really trying to, again, kind of be present in that moment of kind of being with the text and feeling comfortable in my body, as I’m reading something to make me feel comforted and comfortable. And I like audio content as well. When I’m commuting to campus, I will listen to podcasts quite regularly. Sometimes I’ll enjoy having a podcast play in the background while I’m cleaning, or doing another task where I can sort of half listen and half move my body around as well. So, anyway, it’s sort of a long answer because, again, I’ve like thought a lot about this topic, so I have a lot of feelings about how I read, and I always like to know how other people engage with this too. So in the OneHE course, if you want to share what you’re doing, I always love to know as well.
– Yeah, I mean, your answer is a good illustration of the idea, right? So, our reading choices depend on the context, our individual preferences, and the things that’d be most helpful to us in terms of whatever we’re trying to do or achieve. So, these ideas are really important for faculty members to think about in terms of how they have their students engage with the course material. So, how are you sharing these ideas with faculty? How can readers connect with you and learn more either sort of online, in print or in person?
– Right. So, I can check with faculty about this topic in a number of different ways. I do offer live workshops to faculty facing audiences that either can focus on the whole, I have a digital reading framework in my book, so I give an overview workshop on that framework with lots of example activities that faculty can engage within their classes. But I also offer much more targeted workshops on specific reading strategies, like contextualising reading for research, or curating reading across different resources. So, I can go big or go small, depending on what faculty need or are interested in. I also offer student-facing workshops on this topic. I’ve had a lot of people ask me over the years, oh, can you talk to students directly about their reading experiences? So, that’s a workshop I’ve also developed based on this book in recent years. You can find out more about my workshops on my website. That’s where I have some thumbnail descriptions of them, but I can also be reached directly sort of via my institutional email that maybe we can include in the notes with this interview.
– Yeah.
– Yes. I also come to campus too, so if you’d like a visit, I’d be happy to come visit.
– All right. Thanks very much for it, Jenae. Thanks, Jenae.
– Thank you, Jim.
Excerpt from the book
“Accessing course content in digital forms may seem like a win-win for everyone involved in higher education: as more texts become digitized, instructors can give their students a diversity of texts to access and students can save money on course materials. However, we should not see digital texts as important to consider only because of their cost, convenience, and efficacy. As we move students increasingly toward reading from digital texts, we need, at the very least, to take their learning needs into consider- ation. How might reading texts on-screen change the ways that students respond to, annotate, and investigate texts? How might accessing readings from networked devices, like phones and laptops, affect how students are navigat- ing, accessing, and engaging with course material? To what extent does the form of the text itself impact students’ un- derstanding of the content?
We already know the simple answer to this last question: an awful lot. Educational researchers have conducted nu- merous studies around the retention of reading material delivered from a screen and from a paper page and the find- ings are significant (Baron, 2015; Myrberg & Wiberg, 2015; Mangen, Walgermo, & Bronnick, 2013; Daniel & Woody, 2013; Kretzschmar et al., 2013; Ackerman & Goldsmith, 2011; Coiro & Dobler, 2007; Liu, 2005). On the whole, these studies consistently conclude that students retain, remember, and comprehend information more thoroughly when reading on paper than on a screen. Yet although these kinds of findings have grabbed newspaper headlines, researchers have qualified their studies with the important note that they did not control for attitude, motivation, or prior student habits. As Kretzschmar et al. (2013) express, “The present findings thereby suggest that the skepticism towards digital reading media . . . may reflect a general cul- tural attitude towards reading in this manner rather than measurable cognitive effort during reading” (p. 8). This cultural attitude may be due to a flat understanding of the work that reading involves, too; reading, in this case, may very well be conceived of solely as a way to collect and re- member information, but it may also include the processes of searching, analyzing, summarizing, and responding to text itself. We might say that an inertia gap is at play in reading at the college level: we keep trying to apply print- based reading strategies to digital reading spaces, but upon realizing those strategies don’t work, we move toward blaming the digital space itself.
That’s not to say that digital spaces are particularly well designed for effective reading strategies, even those that are attentive to the benefits of the digital space, but we’ve jumped so quickly to lay blame on the space itself that we have not made room to reform either the digital spaces or the strategies we use to navigate those spaces as readers. As Ziming Liu (2004) points out, “printed media and dig- ital media have their own advantages and limitations. The challenge is to determine the applicability of a particular medium in a given context or process” (p. 701). This chal- lenge should not just be one we ask students to take on for themselves, but one that institutions of higher education and instructors should partner on with students. If we approach reading at the college level with a spirit of open- ness and awareness of how reading in different spaces may create new possibilities for understanding and interpreting information, we can close the inertia gap around approach- ing reading at the college level across the curriculum.
Clearly, we still have to learn a lot about students’ moti- vation to read in different spaces and the strategies they’ve acquired as they move across reading in these spaces. Researchers also acknowledge that we still have much to learn from a neurological perspective (a perspective that we will explore more in later chapters). Yet one finding is obvi- ous: we have enough evidence to suggest that reading from a screen changes students’ perceptions and comprehension of source content. But what about students who grew up with these screens around them? Won’t reading in these spaces be natural to them?” (Cohn, J. (2021) Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digitial Reading, pp 12-14).
To get in touch with Jenae, please contact her at [email protected].
For discussion
In the interview, Jenae Cohn shares her print, online, and audio reading habits. What are yours? Do you have reasons and preferences for what you read in which format? What might your answer tell you about how students should read in your courses?
References
Click here to view the video transcript
– I’m with Jenae Cohn, the executive director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of California, Berkeley, and Jenae is the author of “Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading”. So Janae, most research on reading for learning has shown an advantage for reading in print, but you want to complicate that story for us. Can you give us a quick overview of your argument?
– Absolutely, Jim. Thanks for asking this question. So, the argument of “Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading” is that we have to really think expansively about reading practices, behaviors, and intentional environments. The studies on reading in different modalities really help us understand that reading in print is really well suited for reading in large, concentrated blocks of time, in sort of situations where you have to, perhaps, recall different facts or information more readily. But there’s a lot of situations where we read where fact recall or understanding where information is on a particular page may not be as important. I think the goal is to be really intentional in why we read, and then to make choices about where and when we read accordingly.
– Okay. So, a lot of faculty sort of defaulting to online reading assignments for lots of good reasons, because reduced cost for students, I have three kids in college right now, and most of their reading assignments are coming in digital forms. A few times in the semester, when would it make sense for like a faculty member to say, I want to stop and ask you to read something on a printed page?
– Sure. There’s a number of situations where faculty may want students to be more mindful of their attentional environment, of how they’re engaging with text in particular. So, I could see reading in print being really useful if, say, a faculty member wants students to really unplug, to not have access to the internet and all of those features at their disposal. And to get to have a moment of just really, again, engaging with the text and the text alone. I could also see engaging with print being useful if the material itself is actually part of the active interpretation as well. So, there’s some texts that a faculty may be assigning where it’s really important for students to see that it’s part of a magazine, or part of a book, or part of a newspaper, right? That material environment may shape, again, these sort of interpretive engagement. I’m also thinking about situations where perhaps the faculty member wants the student to read a poem or a piece of literature where the fixed appearance is really important, or having the text adaptable or muted in some way, excuse me, mutated in some way, as it might on screen, may interfere with the way the text should be understood. This is all to say that faculty, however, should be mindful that students may still need accommodations or ways to access text that aren’t printed. So, if you have a student who, by means of an accommodation, requires their text to be rendered digitally, no matter what, it is really important to honor that accommodation and make sure students do feel included in the reading experience, even if print is not available to them in some capacity. So, for example, if you have students who need a text-to-speech application and they need to listen to something via audio, they may need to engage with a digital device, because the printed page won’t really mean anything to them. So, I would just say that, again, we’ve gotta be sort of understanding of the different needs that students may have, while, again, also designing assignments with attention, not just to the content of what’s on the page, but to the environment in which that content is produced, circulated and received.
– So let’s stay on this question for just a second, and let me flip.
– Sure.
– When would be the times when the faculty member may want to emphasise digital reading, for example? And what kinds of situations in which they would maybe have that be the better way for students to actually engage with the material, like in a digital context or an audio context?
– Sure. So, I think digital reading is great for tasks like reading for research. So, one thing that works really well on screen is the ability to process large amounts of information at once, and be able to curate those pieces either by using online annotation tools, by creating sets of folders or bookmarks to collect lots of pieces of information, and even if you’re just reading one text, to give students the ability to easily cut or copy and paste material to different places and environments to create new patchworks of text or new meaning. That’s a really cool way to engage in digital reading. I also think if you’re wanting students to be thinking multi-modally about text, right? If they’re reading texts that were written online and were intended for online distribution, such as various web texts with embedded images, or links, or videos, that’s going to be more appropriate to read online, because, again, there’s that attention to the environment that’s really pivotal to the active interpretation. Just as, again, maybe a printed material necessitates the reading in that particular space. I would say that for audio too, right? I think it depends, again, on how the text was composed, but it may also depend on what options you want to make available to students who may find it easier to engage with text if they’re listening to it. So, I would just say if you can give students one other option or way to engage with the experience of reading, it usually helps. And I think, as an instructor, the best thing you can really do is make students aware of those options and point out what they get out of the different spaces. Again, with your first question about reading in print, a lot of students and faculty express a preference for print if they’re trying to have a lot of silence, if they’re trying to really have that sort of meditative and focused experience. But many prefer digital texts, again, when they’re trying to access lots of different pieces of information and are trying to engage with diverse sources and resources across different spaces. So, I’d say that pointing out some of those general trends while also giving students room to be agential in how they want to experience the reading is really important for teachers to think about.
– Yeah, it reminds me actually the idea of, what you’re arguing here reminds me of the notion of plus one thinking. And so, that comes from Tom Tobin and Kirsten Behling’s book “Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone”, right? So, you want to have chosen modality, but then have a plus one option. You could do it this way, but you could do this this other way as well, right? And that’s going to accommodate as many learners as possible. So, I really like that idea. So, tell me a little bit about what drove you into sort of doing research on student reading practices and what’s most helpful for your student learning.
– Absolutely. So, my interest in this topic derived from both my own experience as a reader as well as my experiences of teaching writing. So, I have a very distinct memory of my first quarter of graduate school, trying to print every single article I had to read for classes, every single week. I was going through reams of printed paper, I think I had to buy a new ink cartridge from my printer every single week, because I was reading like 500 pages of text a week. And it struck me that it just wasn’t a sustainable way to read. Not only I was a broke grad student at a certain point, I couldn’t afford it, and my department, you’ve probably had this experience, throttled how much we could print per week. So, I had some material constraints, really that impacted what I could do. And I noticed that my students faced those same sets of material constraints for their reading. They weren’t always able to print, not just because of the expense, but because they didn’t always have access to a printer, or they were commuting on the campus, on the bus, and didn’t want to be carrying around reams of paper or stacks of books in their backpacks. I noticed that most students in my class, when they were accessing the reading, they really were just doing it on their laptop most of the time. And so, in my own experience of attempting to adjust my practices to read on screen, and in my experiences of noticing that students were largely reading on screen and struggling with it, seeing my own struggles reflected in the students struggles as well really motivated me to better understand how do we leverage the capacity of reading on screen more meaningfully? How do we make sure that we know what skills we need to develop to do this successfully? What are some ways we can build upon tried and true practices for reading that derive from print-based modalities? And when might the affordances of being on screen give us some new techniques and opportunities to engage with our reading more purposefully, more mindfully?
– Yeah, that’s great. And so, tell me about your reading practices these days, what’s your sort of different kind of modalities that you read in?
– Gosh, I read in so many different modalities all the time. I’m constantly switching and, of course, after writing this book, I’m even more intentional about my decisions. So, I would say that for scholarly reading, when I’m reading for my own research, or I’m reading to improve my own teaching practice, or my faculty development work, I’m exclusively reading online these days. And that’s primarily just because it’s so much easier for me to access diverse authors and texts from different publications and books. Plus I have a really robust note taking and citation management practice now. It actually makes it easier for me to toggle between reading and writing where I’m using a citation manager to keep track of everything I’ve read, I’m using that tool to keep notes and store my annotations, and I can tag and sort the abundance of things I’m reading constantly a lot better on my computer, digitally, than I think I could do with the materials available to me in paper. But I still love reading on paper too, especially for narrative. You can’t see it in this room, but I’ve got a huge wall of books like you, Jim, with all my favorite novels in my other room. So, I still really enjoy my pleasures reading on paper, and I still order my copy of the New Yorker in a print magazine because I love the feeling of just being on my couch on a Sunday, catching up on the news features. So, there’s an emotional dimension to reading that’s still really important to me and that is bound with the material experience of having a book, or having a magazine, that I know a lot of academics probably relate to. But, again, I’m orienting very differently, I’m not really taking notes, I’m not really trying to extract information, I’m really trying to, again, kind of be present in that moment of kind of being with the text and feeling comfortable in my body, as I’m reading something to make me feel comforted and comfortable. And I like audio content as well. When I’m commuting to campus, I will listen to podcasts quite regularly. Sometimes I’ll enjoy having a podcast play in the background while I’m cleaning, or doing another task where I can sort of half listen and half move my body around as well. So, anyway, it’s sort of a long answer because, again, I’ve like thought a lot about this topic, so I have a lot of feelings about how I read, and I always like to know how other people engage with this too. So in the OneHE course, if you want to share what you’re doing, I always love to know as well.
– Yeah, I mean, your answer is a good illustration of the idea, right? So, our reading choices depend on the context, our individual preferences, and the things that’d be most helpful to us in terms of whatever we’re trying to do or achieve. So, these ideas are really important for faculty members to think about in terms of how they have their students engage with the course material. So, how are you sharing these ideas with faculty? How can readers connect with you and learn more either sort of online, in print or in person?
– Right. So, I can check with faculty about this topic in a number of different ways. I do offer live workshops to faculty facing audiences that either can focus on the whole, I have a digital reading framework in my book, so I give an overview workshop on that framework with lots of example activities that faculty can engage within their classes. But I also offer much more targeted workshops on specific reading strategies, like contextualising reading for research, or curating reading across different resources. So, I can go big or go small, depending on what faculty need or are interested in. I also offer student-facing workshops on this topic. I’ve had a lot of people ask me over the years, oh, can you talk to students directly about their reading experiences? So, that’s a workshop I’ve also developed based on this book in recent years. You can find out more about my workshops on my website. That’s where I have some thumbnail descriptions of them, but I can also be reached directly sort of via my institutional email that maybe we can include in the notes with this interview.
– Yeah.
– Yes. I also come to campus too, so if you’d like a visit, I’d be happy to come visit.
– All right. Thanks very much for it, Jenae. Thanks, Jenae.
– Thank you, Jim.