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Aug 20, 2023

5 On Your Side: How well does bionic reading work?

Reading performance has dropped a lot over the last couple school years of remote learning. Fewer than half of North Carolina students in grades 3 through 8 are reading at their grade level or better.

Reading performance has dropped a lot over the last couple school years of remote learning. Fewer than half of North Carolina students in grades 3 through 8 are reading at their grade level or better. That’s a 10% point drop from pre-pandemic scores.

A method that may help struggling readers is called bionic reading. People claim it helps them read faster, comprehend better and stay focused.

Bionic Reading works by highlighting parts of words to create artificial focal points that are intended to guide your eyes through text faster.

There are phone apps and extensions for your web browser that change regular text into bionic text.

5 On Your Side wanted to know if this was something that could help your student, so we invited students to test it out with us. We had students of various ages read a page from a book in standard text and bionic text and timed the readings.

Our first tester, rising third grader Mia Gilliam, said reading is her favorite subject. She read her page in standard text first, then bionic text. Her reading time improved by 30 seconds reading the same passage a second time with bionic text.

Gilliam didn’t prefer one text over the other but said reading the passage a second time helped her the most. "When you first read the book it’s like you’re trying to figure out what’s going on in this book, so when the next time you read it you’re more confident that you know the words," Gilliam told us.

Our second tester, rising sixth grader Daniya Murden, said her favorite subject is science; but she also enjoys reading from time to time. She also read standard text first, then bionic text. Her reading time improved by eight seconds with bionic text.

She preferred bionic text, telling us "the words are bold and I can kind of understand it a little bit more in reading."

We flipped the test for rising ninth grader Deanna Murden.

We gave her the bionic text first then had her read the same passage in standard text. Her read time was nine seconds faster reading standard text and she preferred it over the bionic text.

"That one was a little bit easier to read because of the way the letters were," Murden said about the standard text.

Search social media and you’ll find the same thing we did in our test. There all kinds of mixed reactions to bionic reading, from people who love it to others who think it looks difficult to read.

There is not a lot of research on bionic reading, and what we found didn’t show any proof people were actually reading faster.

Still, we found several North Carolina State University students who were surprised by how much they felt like bionic texted helped.

"That was definitely easier," said Lea McKelvey.

"It made it more accessible and I felt like I could read quicker," Sarah Teagle told us.

How you feel about reading bionic text may be the key benefit.

Whether you’re reading faster or not, that feeling of being able to read fast, comprehend better and stay focused may be worth testing it out.

There are several different apps and extensions that convert text from standard to bionic. The "Jiffy Reader" app and Chrome browser extension worked well in our testing. So did the "Bionic Reading" app.