Today, Explained - The kids aren't reading all right

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

College students in 2024 are less willing and able to read full books. Today, Explained asks whether that matters. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Boston University students relaxing. Photo by Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Have you heard of social annotation? It's kind of like the annotation you used to do in a textbook or a novel with a pencil or a pen, except now we're marking up the margins as a group on our screens with our machines. Social annotation is actually how we edit every episode of Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. But you know where else social annotation is huge? On college campuses. Students are completing their reading assignments on social annotation apps

where they can comment and ask questions in the digital margins of a reading assignment. And teachers can track how much time students spend with a given article, essay, or journal. And our old friend AI will even grade students' reading for teachers. And why would teachers need these kinds of tools? Because college kids just aren't that into reading anymore. grade students reading for teachers. And why would teachers need these kinds of tools? Because college kids just aren't that into reading anymore. What on earth are we going to do about that? Ahead on the show today.

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concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. You're listening to Today Explains. Is it Today Explain or Today Explains? Explain, duh. Explain, duh. I'm Beth McMurtry, and I'm a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Okay. You're a senior writer, but we're here to talk to you about reading. Why are we talking to you about reading? What's going on with reading? Sorry, are we starting, or you're just— This is it. Yeah. It's so casual. 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 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. 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. 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. And so I take it a class that might require students to read, what, four or five books? Is it functioning the way it used to when I was in college 15 years ago? 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. 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. 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. Reading research articles may be a different type of reading than you are used to. This tutorial will help you create a strategy for reading and understanding this type of information. They're substituting in news articles or essays. More professors are introducing videos. Hey y'all, I'm Nick and this is my video blog and podcast. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.

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. How did we get here? This didn't happen overnight, did it? 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. 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. 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. I like my suitcase.

Reading what on TikTok? It's all video. 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. Good morning, y'all. Okay, so as y'all know, today is a virtual learning day. That means, Louis, that we can see you. Having to teach in 2020 during the height of the pandemic led to a lot of traumatic experiences. Teacher burnout was at an all-time high. A lot of students were depressed. It was just a lot of bad things going on. 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. In some school districts, teachers might have been told, you know, gives everybody at least a 50 percent, 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. 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'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, right? So, students were taught to read in this way, and they come into college reading this way. And then professors who, you know, 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, right? They weren't engaging in the act of reading. You know, this might be an insensitive question, but do we have any data that suggests whether,

in addition to reading less, students are, I don't know, getting dumber? 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. Let's talk about those college admission test scores. They are dropping lower than they've ever been. More than 40 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?

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. So is that an argument professors can make here? If nothing else, if you want to be as smart as your, you know, predecessors in your position, do the reading? 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. Okay, sorry. 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 the skills and abilities students are coming out of high school with and coming into college with, do we care enough to change that? Do you think this trend can be turned around? 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. 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? And the truth is, we don't know yet, because we're just at the beginning of the deep reading that we have been used to doing. And the truth is, we don't know yet, because we're just at the beginning of the shift.

Beth McMurtry is a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education. You can read her, if you're into that sort of thing, at chronicle.com. When we return, we're going to talk about what's going on in your noggin when you're reading and why you might miss that sensation when it's gone. A little food for thought coming up on Today Explained. Take a look, it's in a book. Today Explained. Cut! What? Is that not what it says?

Marianne Wolfe has probably read more books than you this year. Oh my goodness, probably somewhere between 50 and 75. 50 and 75? I have a reading life. I learned to bookend my day, which means I begin with a book and I end with a book. Marianne is so big on reading, we had to ask, Professor, are you in the pocket of big book?

I don't know what it is. We also asked her some questions she could answer, like why it seems that most people are choosing the opposite path she is when it comes to reading books. The repercussions of the digital culture are such that we never knew what I considered the pernicious effects of the kind of efficiency that the digital screen gives us. So the book is the antithesis of the get it done and over with mode. Books have become like vinyl, you know, for though that Emily Dickinson would say for that select society, that shouldn't be the case. I'm sure there's a lot of people in our audience who know exactly what you mean. But for all the people listening who need to be convinced that they're actually missing out on something. What do you think they're missing out on? So, Sean, I'm going to answer in two modes.

I'm going to answer as a cognitive neuroscientist who studies the reading brain. Okay. And I'm going to answer as a former English literature major. So, I'm going to first start with the cognitive neuroscience. The reality is that no one on this earth was meant to read. The brain had to build up a new circuit. And that new circuit connects all these amazing parts of the brain, cognition, language, perception, memory, but also feeling, affect. So we build this circuitry. And then over time, we actually have the capacity to elaborate it. It becomes ever more sophisticated. And when it becomes sophisticated, it begins to have a circuit I call the circuit for deep reading and figuring out how the new information meets or does not meet the information stored already.

Most important to me are the three big deep reading processes. Empathy. Sean, it takes time, but the brain connects the ability to leave, really leave the page and enter the lives and thoughts and feelings of others who are completely different, whether it's a completely different historical epoch or a different culture, religion, etc. You are entering that life. That's empathy. Next and probably never more important than this moment is critical analysis. We have a frontal lobe dance in which we say, ah, this is what is meant. Oh no, this is, this, I refute this because it's not true. So we have this evaluation process, but it takes time. And the end is a real sense, whether it's true misinformation or worst of all,

especially these days, intentional disinformation. Now, the third deep breathing process is one that doesn't always happen. And that's this almost like sanctuary feeling of being so immersed that this is where the novelist Proust comes in in my work. He said, the heart of reading is when we enter the wisdom of the author and go beyond it to discover our own wisdom, our own insights, our own best thoughts. Most of the people who are not reading books aren't reading at that level. But from my perspective as an English literature major,

they're not just skimming the information and getting, you know, just the gist. They're skimming the opportunity to enter another life. Are we missing out when we read a dozen articles before we go to bed on our phone or first thing when we wake up? Are we missing out if we decide to listen to Moby Dick as an audiobook while we commute over the course of a month instead of sitting down and reading it every day when we get home from work? So, every single. I blew it. No, you ask it because, and I have answered it because it is on the top of everyone's mind. I love audiobooks and I especially like them for commuting or for, and I work with a lot of individuals with dyslexia.

That's one of the best ways they can get information. Now, is it the same as reading at the immersive level? For some, it is. But by and large, it does skip what is called comprehension monitoring. That's when we're reading and we are actually checking ourselves, checking what we have missed, what we have skipped. And in the audio version, by and large, we don't go back. There are many other differences, but I'll name one in particular that's important for development and for especially children and individuals over time, and that is the palpable kinesthetic nature of the book because it aids spatial memory. So, Sean, here's a book.

I could find, oh, it's left side lower, about a third of the way through. I have a spatial memory that we aren't even aware of. So there's all these extra, if you will, affordances when we have the physical printed book. Are you worried? You've clearly pointed out that, you know, reading books opens up our minds to a world of possibilities that otherwise we wouldn't be open to. And yet, we're seeing this downward trend. I'm mostly worried about the young.

Junot Diaz said, it's the closest thing to telepathy humans ever get. And that's an amazing, amazingly beautiful, almost mind-boggling opportunity that goes missing. It just plain goes missing when you do not ever understand what that sense of interiority, that sense of immersion can give you. I'll give you the tiniest example. Last night, okay, I probably have COVID. I feel really rotten. You just violated your own hippo. So I'm thinking, you know, oh, no, I feel bad. And I have to go talk to Sean in the morning.

I have to have a voice. I'm feeling miserable, self-pitying. And then I think, how can I cheer myself up? Did you read a book? And I went and read a half a book. Amazing. I read a half a book. And did I feel better?

Yes. I feel good enough to come on your show. How do we convince kids that they're missing out? Because the phone is just so much easier and so much more available. And there's quick hits of dopamine, the kind of hits that you'd have to wait to get to the end of the chapter or the end of the novel. They're just waiting for you on TikTok every six seconds. How do you win against that? We have to model love. Love? We have to love. We have to model love of what happens when we are entering that state.

And I think part of the problem is that we give up before we try. Great books increase the humanity of our world. And I think we are succumbing to the idea that, you know, everything's efficient. Everything is, you know, has to be done quickly. And we have to go with whatever the kids want. How would we let our next generation just go down that slippery slope into the shallows? That's what Nicholas Carr and my colleagues in Norway call, you know, shallow reading.

And Lady Gaga, I believe, also calls it the shallows. In the shallow, shallow. Ah, did she? Well, good for her. It's not just our young, it's all of us. And when I said model, I wasn't kidding. Parents have to model. But that requires some tough things on the parents and teachers. You know, you're going against the tide but if you

don't we're gonna have a what is that um what was that movie where everyone the humans they had given all of their tasks to the robots and finally they they were just these obese creatures. What was that? Was that WALL-E? Yes, WALL-E. Cupcake in a cup. Wow, look at that. We're all going to be WALL-Es. You know, we're going to be cerebral WALL-Es out there. Don't let it happen. Mary Ann Wolf, she is a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA.

We sincerely hope she feels better soon. Peter Balanon Rosen likes big books and he cannot lie. U-C-L-A. We sincerely hope she feels better soon. Peter Balanon Rosen likes big books and he cannot lie. Amina Alsadi edited We Can't Deny. We were mixed by Andrea Christen's daughter and Patrick Boyd, who are great listeners. And Laura Bullard fact-checked she packs all of her books into her suitcase. I like my suitcase. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Furman.

I have to go to school now. Yeah? you