fairfolio
Saved Projects

Effects of Online vs. Printed Textbooks

CSEF · 2016 Behavioral & Social Sciences

Nicholas M. Brdar · De La Salle High School, Concord, Contra Costa County

Overview

Objectives/Goals The goal of this project was to determine if online or printed textbooks lead to significantly different levels of concentration and comprehension. Methods/Materials To test students' comprehension scores, I randomly divided twenty students into two groups, one for online textbooks and one for printed. Each participant read a section of my school's Biology textbook (Miller & Levine, 574-579), either online or printed, and took a comprehension test that I created. To analyze the results, I conducted a two sample t-test. To test concentration levels, I used an EEG Machine (MUSE: The Brain Sensing Headband) and its iPhone application to interpret the results. I used two student participants. Each of their concentration levels was tested for both the online and printed textbooks and then compared. Results I found that students using the printed textbook scored higher on the comprehension test (average score 74%) than those who used the online textbook (average score 50%). On just the questions involving pictures and charts, the online textbook users scored slightly higher (57.5% as compared to 52.5%). Lastly, I found that the students maintained higher concentration levels when using a printed textbook, and their concentration levels constantly changed when using an online textbook. Conclusions/Discussion I discover that printed textbooks lead to higher overall levels of comprehension and concentration, while online textbooks were more beneficial when studying pictures and charts. With the increase in the popularity of ebooks and online educational materials, many schools are currently looking into switching from printed to online textbooks. It is essential that they look into the advantages and disadvantages of each type of textbook before making a final decision.

Summary statement

I found that printed textbooks lead to higher levels of concentration and comprehension, while online textbooks lead to higher comprehension of pictures and charts.

Help received

My science teacher mentored me through the entire process. My school counselor, who has two Master's Degrees in the field of psychology, guided my research of psychology. Julian Homburger, who has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biometry and Statistics from Cornell, helped me with the statistics.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2016 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry S0402

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google