Contribution of G.G. Granik’s scientific school to psychology of understanding: from paper text to digital text

Background. In modern conditions of digitalization of education and the spread of the digital format of reading, it becomes especially relevant to refer to the scientific heritage of Academician of the Russian Academy of Education G.G. Granik, in particular, to her concept of text comprehension. Objective. To analyze and summarize the results of the fundamental and practice-oriented research on the problem of text comprehension, carried out by G.G. Granik and her colleagues during forty years (1980–2020); to present a new empirical study of adolescents’ comprehension of text in the process of reading from paper and from screens. Methods. Methods include theoretical analysis and generalization of research results on the problem of text comprehension, carried out in the scientific school of G.G. Granik. In order to conduct the empirical study, the authors’ diagnostic toolkit was used, aimed at identifying the level of understanding of factual and conceptual textual information. Sample. The total sample consisted of 173 students in grades 7–8 of the secondary schools in the Moscow region. Results. It was found that students who read from paper demonstrate better diagnostic results than those who read from screen, however, the differences are statistically insignificant (p > 0.05). This may indicate that modern adolescents are rather quickly becoming better adapted to the digital format and the differences in reading from paper and from screen are gradually being erased. However, the level of understanding of a long and complex text remains quite low: almost half (49.7%) of the students were unable to formulate the main idea of the text, only 30.6% coped well with this task. Conclusion. Conceptual ideas about text comprehension, generated in the scientific school of G.G. Granik in relation to traditional paper reading have an undoubted development potential and can be used as the basis for research on digital reading.