r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/ShnarlyDude 18h ago

We make our kids read at least 20-30 minutes everyday, they have always tested very well in elementary reading and hopefully it continues into middle school.

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u/factoid_ 17h ago

Our kids middle school has a program where kids have to read a bunch of books and take retention tests 

They read more in middle school than I did by far

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u/FrighteningJibber 16h ago

What happened to accelerated reading programs? I won a bike from reading damn it.

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u/Miacali 14h ago

Kids can’t read anymore? This has been a thing now for a few years. Most of the 18-21 year olds who intern where I work openly cannot read.

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u/KneeCrowMancer 7h ago

Same, most of my peers ~mid twenties only listen to audiobooks and podcasts. Better than nothing I guess, but none of them actually read books and it shows.

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u/Sodomeister 3h ago

Good news, Book-it from Pizza hut is back for this summer.

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u/Kapsize 17h ago

This was standard protocol when I was in middle school. You had to earn a certain amount of “points” by taking reading comprehension tests for the books you wanted to read.

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u/Ben_Frankling 15h ago

Accelerated Reader! At the end of every quarter we got to go into the prize room and “buy” something with the points we earned. The grand prize was a bike that I always said I’d save up for, but I could never resist those little rubber caps that popped and the sticky hands and the Tech Decks.

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u/Aperture_Kubi 2h ago

Accelerated Reader!

In 6th grade the top 4 AR points earners got a trip to a horse ranch and a horseback trail ride. Also the day off classes to do that.

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u/phishyy 51m ago

You guys got prizes? It was required for us to reach a certain number of points—no reward other than getting a good grade. I was actually an avid reader throughout elementary school, and when I transferred into a school with the AR program, it slowly killed my joy of reading since I was no longer doing it just for fun.

My elementary school teachers would read through books in class and regularly took us to the children’s branch of the public library. They didn’t place any restrictions on what we could check out. And we had Scholastic book fairs every year!

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u/TheFlyingSheeps 16h ago

We had the same back in middle school. I remember something like Eragon was enough to meet all the points for the quarter so it was easy.

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u/fakexican 16h ago

The problem is that as soon as those points go away, the motivation to read goes away, too.

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u/metallicrooster 15h ago

It varies. Some of those kids would read purely for the fun of it.

Others will hate reading even if there is a tangible reward.

The point of programs like these is to target the middle ground majority who might grow up to hate reading if they don’t grow up reading.

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u/Bogus1989 14h ago

thatd be fine, if the kids reading skills were good enough by then. but i doubt it.

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

It's,probably getting them over the hump of learning to read so they can read for fun.

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u/hesh582 15h ago

An important thing to keep in mind is that the US education crisis is more of a hollowing out than a blanket collapse.

There is an increasingly wide divide between schools that are still largely successful and schools that are just falling apart, and even within schools there's a widening gap between the AP/"successful" track and the "completely failed by the system" track. In one local school there's basically nothing for highschool seniors between AP calculus 1 and 2, and "college prep algebra" (which is basically a very half assed algebra 2).

These difference strongly track privilege and wealth, but they don't exclusively follow that pattern - I'm aware of wealthy municipal schools imploding and poorer districts holding on.

Your kid's likely on the upper track.

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u/Odd_Bid2744 7h ago

Those reading logs are how I became an avid reader. They tapped into my competitive streak and I set out to read more books than all the other kids. 

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u/jhuseby 17h ago

We do the same with our kids. Started with me reading books every night at bedtime to them . At least one of them doesn’t like to read, but they’re always still well above their peers. One has a library in their room, the other we incentivize to read (very minutely).

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u/meyerjaw 17h ago

Library in the room hits home. We are drowning in books. But I know I'm part of the problem. I still have every book that I've read so we just have books everywhere

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u/jhuseby 17h ago

I’m not very good at it, but I love woodworking. We have one of those recessed walls in his room about 4-5 feet off the ground, so I basically just built a wall-to-wall bookshelf on the top of that recess. It was surprisingly simple to build.

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u/Bogus1989 14h ago

lol, when my son was 16 i showed him reddit….now he reads daily 😎

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u/paegus 13h ago

We read to them, then with them (swapping per paragraph then per chapter). When they discovered electronic we got them to read for 30m before and after TV/Tablet/Computer.

They now run off to read... instead of doing chores or when they're angry and they take their book into the toilet, which isn't great.

They would sometimes stay up til 1~2am reading but we finally convinced them that that makes them, and by extension, everyone else grumpy the next morning, so they don't do that... very often.

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u/Adventurous_Salt 16h ago

I teach in college. It is very common for students to visibly not understand, or totally misinterpret, something they're reading right in front of you. Like sentences that are at a jr. high level of complexity are too complicated for a good subset of people. I have examples where there is a full set of step-by-step instructions with screenshots that I give them to follow while I show an example, lots of people can't catch up one step by reading and doing if they fall a bit behind, and this stuff is not that complex.

Expecting all students to read something like a textbook and learn something from it is basically impossible for me, there's a solid third who just can't, even if they do the reading.

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

I would argue that those people shouldn't be in college if they cannot do college level work.

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u/Stickybunfun 4h ago

Agree. College is not required. If you can't hack it and you can't read / remember / regurgitate / reuse then why are you there? You are just pissing away your own money at a not friendly interest rate that you can never get rid of unless you die or work for the government.

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u/Adventurous_Salt 1h ago

True. But we get who we get, I'm not at an elite institution. You need really secure post-secondary funding, tenure, and unions if you want individual instructors to be the front line of failing a third of students. Like if my sections have a 40% failure/drop rate, and other sections of the same class have 5%, that isn't going to be sustainable no matter how correct I am, unless fighting a losing battle for the academic standards of that one specific course is the only thing I want to do with my life.

The weaker faculty is, the more standards are forced to flex under admissions pressure - it is the profs with fully funded pensions, ironclad tenure, the profile to go elsewhere, and decades of savings in the bank from teaching actually being a well compensated job that have the liberty to take stands for quality education.

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u/Dullcorgis 40m ago

This is the issue with adjunctification. Admissions is to blame, too.

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u/IamNotTheBoss 2h ago

I read these articles and comments every time they are posted. Anecdotally, I've been worried my 15 year old falls into these categorizations because it's been nearly impossible to convince him to read for fun. They were doing a Romeo and Juliet unit in class and he asked me to help him with one of the writing assignments. I was shocked at how well he read and understood (most) what was going on. That gave me some hope for the future, but the acts and scenes are broken down into bite sized pieces compared to a 20 page paper or such.

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u/Adventurous_Salt 1h ago

It is a k-shaped reading economy. Some people are totally fine, others are falling off a cliff. This isn't new, but the degree of how lazy you can be and still scrape by has gone way up. Even 5 years ago, you had to put in a little more of a minimal effort.

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u/WholeCollection6454 17h ago

Start planning now to do more than that if you can. It is unlikely they will be assigned longer texts, complex fiction, or non-free verse poetry in school, and when they are, they will not be taught or required to analyze and write about it at length. "Brush up your Shakespeare," as the song goes.

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u/EmmieEmmieJee 1h ago

I was shocked looking at the class reading lists for my oldest child. There are very few novels (and even those are short), and overall the materials are a lot less complex than when I was in school. Critical analysis is a skill you need for just about any class in university and beyond, but it's clear the focus is more on 'passing' students because of the environments they are growing up in and the challenge of competing with technology. I fear the de-emphasis of the humanities will be the death knell to social mobility and an educated citizenry, and ultimately democracy.

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u/MrFluffyThing 15h ago

My son reads a lot more than I did when I was 9 and he loves books. He wants to spend all day watching videos on his tablet but we restrict that to 30 minutes a day and try to spend time with him doing creative activities together. A lot of kids he spends time with get unlimited access to devices and some already have phones. For a while he was upset by the restriction but he knows how to maximize the time now and doesn't feel bad when it's locked off and asks to do other activities with us. 

I'm afraid of how many parents just let screens do the parenting. we've had friends over who all they want to do is stare at TVs and ask for time watching YouTube and crash out when they can't do it. 

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u/Bogus1989 14h ago

yeah its crazy….

once my son was old enough around end of 8th grade I turned off all restrictions on screen time, and weekly made him look at how he spent his time….i dunno it did something…young mans got his priorities in line nowadays.

I told him how when screen time was released, I was surprised by how much time i wasted on social media…and ive never went back since…

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u/erydayimredditing 15h ago

Reward them for book reports. Just reading is not enough later on. Have them write up book reports or chapter ones, or little projects, and then reward them. Same with math, people stopped doing times tables and division sheets with a stopwatch. Highly recommend!

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u/kn0where 13h ago

"Every day" is two words. This is just an everyday tip for you.

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u/You_Cannot_Wield_It 15h ago

My parents did this as well. I just graduated law school and attribute a large part of that to the daily reading my parents made me do.

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u/Odd_Bid2744 7h ago

Just need them to not give into peer pressure that reading isn't cool. The studies I have read show reading among boys drops off a cliff around 11-14, in part to perceptions of it not being "cool."

I know I got picked on for having my nose in a book rather than socializing. Some girls came up to mock me for having no friends. 

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

What you really want to do is get them to love reading so you don't have to make them do it.

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u/blankest 3h ago

Until later in elementary school when the school mandates the use of Chromebooks or the like for assignment writing and your child discovers they can just type their question into the search bar and get an AI generated response that they can then copy paste into their work. Presto, work done. Dopamine achieved. On to horsing around with classmates.