Reading media and multitasking: effects on comprehension and metacomprehension when reading multiple texts

What is it about?

In today’s world, teenagers often read on screens while dealing with constant notifications and switching between tasks. This study explored how reading on paper or on a tablet, together with multitasking (or not), influences students’ ability to understand information from several texts and to judge how well they understood it. We worked with 151 Spanish secondary school students (from 8th to 10th grade) and found that: - Multitasking made it harder to identify conflicting information across texts, only when reading in print. - Students struggled to judge their own understanding, regardless of whether they read on paper or on a tablet. They often overlooked contradictions between texts without noticing. Overall, our study suggests that students’ expectations about digital reading influence how they handle distractions, and that overconfidence remains a challenge when dealing with multiple texts, independently of the reading media.

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Why is it important?

This study is important because it is the first to look at both reading media (paper vs. tablet) and multitasking together in a multiple‑text situation, a type of reading that nowadays is more the norm rather than the exception. We show that multitasking can disrupt understanding in unexpected ways, and that students often don’t realize when their comprehension is slipping. Since young people regularly read conflicting information online while facing distractions (such as messaging), these findings highlight a real cognitive cost: students may miss contradictions, feel more confident than they should, and become more vulnerable to misinformation. Additionally, we show that multitasking impairs comprehension in a more notable way when reading in print, a format that students usually associate with deeper reading engagement, compared to digital format. Understanding multitasking risks helps us design better ways to support students’ reading and self‑monitoring skills in multiple-text and digital environments.

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