Print VS Online

Research has shown that experienced readers have less need for signals, including headings, than unproven readers. Readers’ experience with the print medium may help them understand more with print-based text than with online text. Online text compared with print text is still in its infancy and is less established and common, and it may be more difficult to understand. Thus, signals may be able to offer more help to readers of online text, as suggested by Macedo-Rouet et al. (20).Across the online and print conditions, we see that high frequency headings reduced comprehension overall. Yet when we observe the disparity effect of heading frequency on readers of print-based readers versus online text, we further see that readers of print-based text are much less impacted by heading frequency than online readers. The online readers had significantly lower knowledge with the high frequency (i.e., a heading approximately every 100 words) versus medium frequency (i.e., a heading approximately every 200words) heading setting. If readers were confused with the online text to begin with, this feeling might have been complex by the high frequency headings as they tried to understand the flow of text. To elaborate, if we think about the differences in layout and legibility between print and online documents, we can further understand this idea. While readers of print based text can foresee upcoming information and “get the lay of the land,” readers of online text cannot physically spread out the pages to get a quick overview of the text, a difference that might affect conception and might description for the damaging effect of too many headings with online readers. Perhaps too much chunking of text works against creating a good, accurate representation and may negatively influence comprehension. Also, although screen resolution and legibility have improved overall, some of these factors could still affect online reading.