Ler para compreender no mundo digital: compreensão e metacompreensão em papel e tela

Abstract

During the past two decades, digital resources have changed the scenario in which reading is accessed and now play a fundamental role in our culture and society. Increasingly, laptops, tablets and cell phones are used in everyday contexts, including the schools. Thus, the presence of screens in our society is changing the way people share, consume and create knowledge, in a way that affects the social, cultural and educational skills of its users. This research aimed to verify the differences in comprehension and metacomprehension between reading on paper and on screen. Participants were fifty students from the 5th grade of Brazilian Ensino Fundamental I. They read two short texts, one informative and the other narrative, estimated their reading comprehension in each of the texts and then answered a test of reading comprehension in two conditions: paper and screen. The results suggested an advantage of printed material (paper) regarding reading comprehension. The metacomprehension indicators showed that children believed they understood better when they read on screen than on paper, which does not correspond to the results of the comprehension tests. Therefore, in children it seems to occur an impairment in awareness of comprehension, which indicates that differences between reading devices may be metacognitive. Possible implications and future directions are pointed out in this study