Flipbook: Testing the Marshmallow Test

For those who prefer their information in a more-colourful magazine-style format than bare-bones blog posts, I’ve put the two recent Marshmallow Test posts together in an online flipbook format that adds to the growing collection I’ve put together over the years.

A flipbook, if you haven’t come across the format before, is basically an online document where you turn the pages using a mouse click or motion. While that may not sound very exciting -probably because it isn’t actually very exciting unless you live a very sedentary, sheltered, existence – it mimics the way we read offline.

And this is significant because studies such as Mangen et al (2013) and Delgardo et al (2018) have shown that reading printed paper texts increases levels of student comprehension.

Now, the obvious question here is whether reading an online text that mimics a printed paper text has the same effect by fooling the brain into thinking it’s something that it’s not?

And the obvious answer is “who knows?”. But it’s an interesting idea that, I think we can all agree,  should probably merit a lot more research funding.

However, leaving aside the ins-and-outs of academic research funding, as I’m afraid we must, online flipbooks have one main advantage over both their offline and online (pdf) cousins: namely the ability to show embedded video. In the case of the Marshmallow Test this is a big advantage because it allow students to see examples of something like the actual experiments.

The other advantages of the flipbook over the blog post format involve various technical bits-and-bobs such as the ability to annotate and print pages or view page thumbnails (granted, not the world’s greatest technical advantage but it does allow for quick searching).

Finally, when you’re encouraging your students to read a little more, anything that makes it a slightly more pleasant experience is probably something we should welcome.