Beth McMurtry
Appearances
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
I'm Beth McMurtry, and I'm a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
Sorry, are we starting, or you're just— This is it.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
Well, there's a lot that's going on with reading. When it comes to reading, one of the things that I've been hearing a lot from a lot of different faculty members is that students simply aren't doing the reading.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
A lot of professors are finding that if they assign anything that's more than five or ten pages long, students tell them that they can't do it, that they get distracted, that they get exhausted, that they get lost in the reading, and then they just give up.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
Another element to this, too, though, and one I think that is the most alarming to professors, is that students are coming to college lacking critical reading skills. They might be asked to summarize what they've read and they fundamentally change the meaning of it. They can't summarize it. They might be asked to compare and contrast two readings and they simply can't do it.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
It's a fascinating phenomenon that we're facing because, yes, we assume that by the time you get to college, you know how to read. Obviously, people can still pick up a book or an article and get the gist of it. But what we're talking about now is like reading a dense or complicated or lengthy article or textbook or novel. That's what seems to have been fading with this generation.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
No, I think you would, if you went into a college classroom today or you looked at a college syllabus, you would probably be surprised at how little reading is assigned. I mean, professors understand that they have to kind of meet students where they are. They understand that if students are not doing the reading, they have to change things up.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
Otherwise, they will have a really bad class session and they will have students who simply aren't doing the work. So what I've been hearing from professors is, you know, maybe 15 years ago they assigned five novels and today they're assigning one.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
Or they may be eliminating academic articles altogether, those really dense academic articles that we all struggled with and students simply can't read them.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
They're substituting in news articles or essays. More professors are introducing videos.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
And other sort of original content as a way to kind of get students engaged in the course without saying, I need you to read a book a week to get through this class.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
No, it didn't, because what we're talking about here are kind of structural or systemic societal and educational challenges. So let's start with the one that everybody knows about, which is the introduction of smartphones and the rise of social media. That has affected all of us. We are losing our ability to concentrate. We are getting distracted more easily.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
I remember talking to one professor, an English professor. He has always asked his students to tell him their reading story, their reading narrative. He wants to know what their experiences with reading have been.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
And he said it wasn't that long ago that they would talk about things like going to the library or seeing their parents reading the newspaper over breakfast or having their parents read to them at night. Now they talk about things like reading on TikTok, reading on Instagram.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
Yeah. If you think about the words on the screen, fragmented, incomplete sentences. Now, the pandemic did have a huge effect on students, unsurprisingly, as we all moved to Zoom and students went to Zoom school. I have to go to school now. Teachers were trying really hard to keep students engaged, to keep students online, even if their cameras were off.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
I don't know about you, but the school year has been kind of tough for me, and I've had to rethink a lot of things that I do traditionally. So students were learning less and they were reading less, and at the same time, the grading changed a little bit. There was more leniency around grading.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
In some school districts, teachers might have been told, you know, give everybody at least a 50%, even if they didn't do the work, or grade for attendance or grade for participation. And what that did is I think it gave students a false sense of what was required of them, something that they have since taken into college.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
If we want to step even farther back, we need to talk about the testing culture in schools, because I think that has really fundamentally changed how we teach reading. Many of us remember, if we're old enough, we remember reading multiple books over the school year, maybe even writing book reports or writing essays.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
When you teach to the test, you're basically assigning short essays, you're assigning paragraphs, you're assigning excerpts from longer books. And then students are asked to say, discern the meaning in this paragraph or talk about the writing style or the use of metaphor. And as one professor described it to me, it turns reading into a scavenger hunt.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
So students were taught to read in this way, and they come into college reading this way. And then professors who maybe didn't fully understand what was happening in the K-12 system are saying, what is going on here? My students don't have critical reading skills. If you think of reading like exercise, they weren't exercising. They weren't engaging in the act of reading.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
I think if you look at certain tests, there has been learning loss. If you look at maybe SAT and ACT trend lines, right, they've been going down a little bit.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
Forty percent of seniors meet none of the college readiness benchmarks the fifth consecutive year. Test scores have declined. Now the question, what is to blame, the pandemic or something else?
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
If you talk to or survey superintendents and teachers, they might say a significant portion of their students are doing more poorly on math and on English. So there has definitely been documented learning loss in K-12 that I think has been tied to the pandemic.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
This generation is very self-critical. So telling students that they're dumb or dumber than previous generations, I think just feeds this spiral of anxiety. I don't think that's a way forward for anybody.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
I think we have to remember that the students didn't create this environment. We, the adults, created the environment and the system that they lived in, right? Like this is the result of our handiwork. So we kind of have to ask ourselves, if we're unhappy with...
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
that the skills and abilities students are coming out of high school with and coming into college with, do we care enough to change that?
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
When it comes to reading, I think it helps to take the long view. I thought it was interesting when I was reporting the story that a couple of different people talked about the shift from the oral to the written culture like thousands of years ago. When writing was first introduced, people mourned the loss of the oral culture, the oral tradition.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
And they just thought of writing as like a negative. Like nobody would say that today. But the point is that if we're shifting to an oral slash written culture again, if we're shifting to a multimedia culture, what does that mean? What are we gaining even as we lose some of the deep reading that we have been used to doing?
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
And the truth is we don't know yet because we're just at the beginning of the shift.
Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
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Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
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Today, Explained
The kids aren't reading all right
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