Een nieuwe studie aan de universiteit van Washington naar het gebruik van de Kindle in het onderwijs toont niet echt positieve reacties. De belangrijkste klachten zijn de gebruikersinterface die voor de lerenden niet voldoet en vooral de gebrekkige mogelijkheden voor het nemen van notities. Dit onderzoek is gebaseerd op 39 eerstejaarsstudenten die over een periode van 9 maanden gevolgd en geïnterviewd werden. Opvallend, enkele maanden ver in het project bleek slechts 40% de toestellen nog intensief te gebruiken.

Dit zijn de belangrijkste bevindingen:

• Students did most of the reading in fixed locations: 47 percent of reading was at home, 25 percent at school, 17 percent on a bus and 11 percent in a coffee shop or office.
• The Kindle DX was more likely to replace students’ paper-based reading than their computer-based reading.
• Of the students who continued to use the device, some read near a computer so they could look up references or do other tasks that were easier to do on a computer. Others tucked a sheet of paper into the case so they could write notes.
• With paper, three quarters of students marked up texts as they read. This included highlighting key passages, underlining, drawing pictures and writing notes in margins.
• A drawback of the Kindle DX was the difficulty of switching between reading techniques, such as skimming an article’s illustrations or references just before reading the complete text. Students frequently made such switches as they read course material.
• The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues such as the location on the page and the position in the book to go back and find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.