(Draft copy of paper presented to The National Reading Conference, Scottsdale, AZ, 1997.  Do not quote without permission.  For additional information, email Michael L. Kamil. )

Technology is being introduced in classrooms at an accelerated pace. However, the volume of research on the particular problems of technology for literacy has been rather small. Kamil and Lane (In Press) examined research over the years 1990-1995. They found that there were only 12 research articles (out of a total of 437) about technology and reading or writing in the four reading and writing journals (Reading Research Quarterly, Journal of Reading Behavior, (since changed to Journal of Literacy Research) with the highest citation rates for literacy research (Shanahan and Kamil, 1994).

Out of a total of 256 articles in the two reading journals, only 3, a little more than 1%, dealt with technology issues directly. (One of these was about television, another about audio and one was about computers.) The situation was somewhat better for the two writing journals. There were 9 articles dealing with writing and technology, out of a total of 181 articles, or approximately 5%. Combined, the total number of technology articles published in these four journals was 12 out of a total of 437 articles, or 2.7%. An important datum is that the bulk of the technology articles in the five-year period was published in 1991 and 1992. These two years account for all but 2 of the technology articles across all of the four journals in the years between 1990 and 1995.

The first question that arises from these data is why, at a time when technology is receiving such attention is the rate of publication so low? One possible explanation for this meager number of published research studies is that the studies are being published in other journals, specifically devoted to computers and technology rather than in the broader, more general research journals.

To determine whether this was the case, a search was undertaken for relevant reviews of research on technology and reading and writing covering the period from 1986-1996. Only three reviews seem to deal with these issues comprehensively. Baldwin, Readence, Schumm, Konopak, Konopak, and Klingner (1992) looked at all of the NRC publications from 1952-1991. They did an analysis by content as well as methodology. In their analysis of key concepts, the terms ‘computer’ or ‘technology’ simply do not appear. However, ‘television’ does occur, as perhaps the only technologically-related term.

Reinking (1995) and Flood and Lapp (1994) both have published technology-related reviews. While Reinking’s focuses on computer technology, it was specifically focused on the issues of post-typographic text. Flood’s focus was on visual literacy and not really on issues of text. Taken together, these two reviews do not shed light on the general problem of the low rate of publication of technology-related research. In the search for relevant reviews, it was found that there was no comprehensive review of research in technology and literacy over this time span. Consequently, this research was directed at two goals. First, a comprehensive review of the research in this area was warranted and was undertaken. Second, trends in publication of technology and literacy research would be examined to determine whether there was simply a small amount of research being conducted or whether it was simply being published in journals other than those most commonly cited in literacy.

A review of the research on computer technology and reading was undertaken to understand the trends in this area. To accomplish this task, the first step was to interrogate both the ERIC and PSYCHINFO databases. Any journal research article that matched the descriptors technology, computers, reading, writing or literacy was listed.

The query was generated in the form of: SUBJECT READ# and SINCE 1986 not YEAR = 1996 and DOCTYPE=research and DOCTYPE=journal article and S=technology. Other queries were composed to cover similar topics in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and literacy. Both ‘technology’ and ‘computer’ were used as qualifiers. These queries yielded a total of 965 articles in 159 different journals.

In a preliminary hand search of the journals, evidence was found that there were articles that did not appear in the ERIC or PSYCHINFO databases. Consequently each of the journals was hand searched for relevant articles that were missed in the database interrogation. Further, many of the articles in the original set did not meet the criteria of true research reports about literacy and technology. For example, some of the articles were merely speculations; others were about computer literacy rather than reading, etc. We applied a simple criterion to include or exclude articles. To be included an article had to deal with the areas laid out above. They had to be based on an empirical data collection. We included reviews of research studies. Since the original search was prior to the end of 1996, we included 1996 issues of journals in the hand search. The final total was 599 studies (from the databases and hand searches) that did meet all of the initial criteria. Of this total, a number of journals were not readily available and had to be temporarily excluded from the analysis. The total number of articles in this category was 149. In addition, hand searching found a large number of errors, identifying 52 inappropriate articles. These were also excluded from the database. This yielded an effective total of 350 articles to be analyzed.

Information on all relevant articles was entered in a database. Each article was assigned a value for number of pages, literacy type, technology type, subject population, special population characteristics, problem, platform, methodology, findings, recommendations and quality. For the purposes of this presentation, we choose to focus on quantitative, rather than interpretive, aspects of these data. These descriptive, quantitative variables to be discussed are: number of pages, literacy type, technology type, subject population, special population characteristics, problem, platform, and methodology.

As a benchmark, an ERIC search revealed that there were 101,612 articles published on reading between 1986 and 1995. Of these, 9132 are journal articles reporting research. The first data analysis was an attempt to determine the volume of research is in each of the ten years. These results are given in Table 1. The entries compare numbers of research journal articles about reading, writing. Table 2 shows the number of articles analyzed in technology and literacy across the same time period. The percentage of technology articles remains relatively constant at between 2-5% of the total per year. (Note that the totals for reading and writing articles represent a severe underestimate. The total does not include those that are about literacy nor does it include those that might be found by hand searching.)

We divided the type of technology into categories to obtain some idea of how research was being apportioned in the field. Table 3 shows these data. It is clear that the general "computer" category is dominant. There are few studies of other technologies represented in the sample. We separated email as a category because it began to appear in these journals about halfway through the time period, coincident with the surge in popularity of the Internet. It still represents a relatively small number of studies.

Our analysis of platform, in Table 4, shows that the largest category was "Unknown", indicating that we simply could not determine from the description what platform was being used. This category differs from the "other" category in which less common platforms are grouped. (This latter category included, for example, Radio Shack, Cromemco, Commodore, Zenith, Sharp and many others.)

Table 5 presents the data for subject populations. By far the largest population was undergraduates, with elementary students being the second largest category. We did categorize each study with respect to special population characteristics, and found that 50 of the 350 were about special education or LD students. Language learners or non-native speakers were second most numerous, accounting for 44 of the studies.

Table 6 presents the various methodologies employed. Experimental methodologies of one sort or another (either experimental or quasi-experimental accounted for 206 of the 350 articles. We found 37 descriptive studies (surveys, analyses of learners’ work, etc.) and 34 observational studies (participant observation, microethnography, etc.).

Table 7 lists the literacy type, indicating that there were slightly more writing studies than reading. Together the two categories account for 260 of the 350 studies.

Another important piece of data is where the research is being published. A total of 69 journals contribute to the current data set. Table 8 presents these data. In fact, the bulk of articles that we found do seem to be published in journals other than mainstream reading and writing journals. Of the top 10 journals (in terms of number of articles published on the topic) only one does not have technology or computers in its title. Writing journals (Research in the Teaching of English, Written Communication) do appear on the list well above the mainstream reading journals.

Finally, we found very few "repeat" authors in the sample. Over 11 years, the largest number of articles by one author was 5. Most authors contributed a single article over the time period.

These data clearly demonstrate that the volume of research in technology and reading has not kept pace with the increasing emphasis on the use of new technologies in schools. The number of research articles published has remained relatively constant over eleven years.

These data also show that research on technology and literacy is not being published in mainstream journals. We believe this is because the reading research community does not regard problems of technology as a high-priority area of study. This is at least in part borne out by the lack of extended publication records in the area. It may be that the field is not yet sufficiently mature to have extended research programs. At the very least, we are not seeing such programs reported routinely in journals. One possibility is that many researchers have an encounter with technology research and never continue with it.

Another aspect of publication is that many of the articles are clustered in special issues devoted to technology in a discipline, rather than more generally incorporated across issues.

We found a clear bias toward experimental and quasi-experimental models of research. This is not to deny that there were many descriptive, interpretive or ethnographic studies. However, the sheer bulk of the studies was clearly quantitative in nature. One factor in this is that many of these studies were attempts at evaluating the efficacy of using technology rather than discovering the factors that might account for success or failure. There is a slight trend toward increasing use of observational methodologies.

There seemed to be no population that was NOT studied. Rather the range was from pre-school to adults, suggesting that the use of technology in reading is not restricted to any specific population. If anything, however, we did find that special education or learning disability populations might have received more attention than others. This is borne out by the fact that Journal of Learning Disabilities ranked well above the mainstream literacy journals in number of articles.

When this research is published, it is published in journals that are more specifically devoted to technology, rather than reading or literacy. We found far more articles in journals like Computers and Schools than in Reading Research Quarterly or Journal of Literacy Research. One difficulty with this state of affairs is that these research results are not disseminated among an important group of stakeholders--mainstream reading researchers.

Finally, we suggest that it is important to monitor these trends because we are in danger of having rapid hardware and software development overwhelm any input that might come from educational research. We do need to encourage concerted effort in researching these issues.

Baldwin, S., Readence, J., Schumm, J., Konopak, J., Konopak, B., & Klingner, J. (1992). Forty years of NRC Publications: 1952-1991. Journal of Reading Behavior, 24, 505-532.

Flood, J, & Lapp, D. (1995). Broadening the Lens: Toward an Expanded Conceptualization of Literacy. In Hinchman, K. A., Leu, D.J. & Kinzer, C.K. (Eds.). Perspectives on Literacy Research and Practice. (Forty-fourth Yearbook of the National Reading Conference.) Chicago: The National Reading Conference, Inc.

Kamil, M., & Lane, D. (In Press). Researching the relationship between technology and literacy: An Agenda for the 21st century. To appear in D. Reinking, M. McKenna, L. Labbo, and R. Kieffer (Eds.). Literacy for the 21st Century: Technological Transformations in a Post-Typographic World. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Reinking, D. (1995). Reading and writing with computers: Literacy research in a post-typographic world. In K. Hinchman, D. Leu, & C. Kinzer (Eds.) Perspectives on Literacy Research and Practice. Chicago: The National Reading Conference (pp. 17-33).

Shanahan, T., & Kamil, M. (1994). Academic Libraries and Research in the Teaching of English. Champaign, IL: National Conference on Research in English and Center For The Study of Reading.