Monday, 13th May - 3pm Ladislao Salmerón : Seminar

Title: Digital reading habits and comprehension

Abstract:

Digitisation of reading constitutes a major societal change of the last two decades. Popular scientific accounts of such change tend to emphasize only its positive consequences, even when evidence doesn’t warrant positive claims, constituting a unique scientific genre termed “Ed-Tech speak/discurse”. Against this tradition, we rely on rigorous methods from the behavioral sciences to study generational and developmental changes in digital reading, including metaanalyses, longitudinal studies and large scale international studies. Our main focus on this talk will be reading habits, as previous research has evidenced medium to strong positive relationships between printed text reading habits and reading comprehension across the lifespan. To what extent the rapid evolution of new forms of digital reading could modify such relationship? In this talk I will present ongoing research that analyzes generational and developmental changes in digital reading habits. A major goal is to relate such changes with readers’ development of text comprehension abilities.

Bio

Ladislao Salmerón is Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Valencia, Spain. He conducts his research at the ERI Lectura, a research unit focused on the study of reading in its multiple facets. He did his PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Granada, Spain. He was a Fulbright scholar at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, USA. His research focuses on digital literacies in different populations. He currently explores how digital reading habits impact comprehension, and how to increase attention to and comprehension of digital texts using online platforms.