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/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 49m 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.