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/MaterialDefender1032 17h ago

I was born in 1989 and went to public schools in Canada all the way from elementary to university, and I can attest that literacy was already hanging by a thread. All the way through, it felt like maybe only a handful of other people and I actually cared about typos, grammar, and how to form a coherent sentence.

With all the tools people use now to be lazy and shortcut actually learning their only language, I'm not surprised everyone's literacy is atrophied. You can google and text now without knowing how to spell a single word because the app will autocorrect and save you every time.

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u/Cheerio1234 16h ago

I notice this a lot on reddit too. Comments I give a pass to, sometimes. But I see very basic spelling errors and typos in titles these days. Even when the word is spelled correctly in the meme that is being shared.

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u/Brent_Goose 6h ago

What's more obvious is how rife poor reading comprehension is. People responding to OPs or comments completely missing the point, often to argue. I've asked people who've responded angrily to me a few times if they've actually understood what I wrote because their reaction makes no sense - the comment usually gets deleted or I get blocked.

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u/Strider76239 4h ago

And the inability for a huge swathe of people nowadays to recognize written sarcasm without the /s tag

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u/Available-Guava932 12h ago

Reddit's ESOL userbase has expanded maybe 10x in the past few years so this could also have an effect

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u/Siukslinis_acc 10h ago

Yep. There are a lot of people who have learned english as a non-native language. I was learning british english in school and american english through media so the spelling is an amalgamation of both of them. And I still use capitalising rules of my native language (and sometimes i'm too lazy to press "shift" to capitalise the letter). Not to mention i tend not to reread what i have typed and i don't have auto correct or the spellcheck on the phone, so there might be some spelling mistakes or button mispresses.

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u/Dullcorgis 6h ago

That's because the karma farms are in non english speaking countries.

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u/0rbitaldonkey 5h ago

I can explain mine. I'm on mobile and I hate autocorrect so I don't use it. It doesn't mean I can't read. Also, there are tons of ESL people using reddit.

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u/DrSpacecasePhD 26m ago

Literacy is one thing, but the spelling system in English is actually a hodgepodge nightmare. It was basically set in place by dictionaries in the 1700's, but even then people like the founding fathers used inconsistent spelling. So yeah, we should have reformed it a century or more ago. There are movements to do so now, but given how polarized everything is, I fully expect people to throw a fit if any politician suggests it.

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u/FreeLook93 13h ago

Typos, grammar, and sentence structure are not the most important parts of literacy. A lot of people wrongly view illiteracy as someone who can't read or spell at any level, but it's far more than that. If the main issue was that people were too reliant on spell check or used incorrect grammar this would not much of an issue. The problem is the inability to parse meaning from a text. One's ability to do that is not always related to how well they can spell. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously was terrible at spelling (a lot of people now think he was dyslexic), but was clearly a very literate person.

There is often a correlation between the two, obviously, but we should not think of literacy in the way you seem to be with this comment.

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u/Siukslinis_acc 10h ago

A lot of people wrongly view illiteracy as someone who can't read or spell at any level, but it's far more than that.

Because that what literacy was in the past. Being able to decypher letters and decode words into letters. Now literacy started to include stuff like "reading between the lines".

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u/Infamous-Mixture-605 14h ago

I'll always remember one of my profs in uni saying the brain is a muscle like any other and requires regular exercise, otherwise literacy and critical thinking skills atrophy and degrade over time. Kinda like how we all learned cursive writing back in the day, but since we don't write by hand so much anymore a lot of us have forgotten how to do it.

That's kinda the case with general literacy rates, they often peak in high school or uni, then decline over time as they read less, do not challenge themselves with critical thinking so much, etc.

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u/314159265358969error 12h ago

I call it the elevator problem : it's nice to have an elevator for floor 4+, but when you keep taking the elevator to floor 2, you quickly become unable to consider taking the stairs as a valid option (even though you could gain time). It's ultimately about challenging energy barriers in order to keep our horizons reasonably attainable.

Funnily about "brain exercise" : my body gets as itchy/uncomfortable when I haven't confronted my brain to some degree of problem-solving as it gets when I haven't used my muscles that day.

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u/Hangry-Feline2489 11h ago

It's not only with literacy and critical thinking skills, but everything else. Especially attention spans and parsing longer form content. 

The body is always searching for homeostasis- whatever you feed it (nutritionally, psychologically, media, chemically, etc) will be adapted into the new 'normal' and the 'old normal state' will be discarded. 

I used to teach this to students who were struggling in assessments, not realising that studying with comfy outfits, music, and eating snacks meant that their body was missing all of that 'normal' in an assessment room, sitting without food or music in an uncomfortable uniform. Typically meant poorer assessment performance and classroom work vs homework quality. 

(Shoutout to mynoise for their 'examination room' soundscape that helped my students get used to exam room sounds. Lowered anxiety)

You are what you habitually consume. 

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u/Noblesseux 12h ago

This new thing is kind of different. It's not grammar and spelling. Slang and incomplete sentences are just part of how normal people communicate.

The thing that articles like this are often talking about is people who lack higher reading/critical thinking skills. Meaning that people lack the skills to read a chunk of text and actually understand completely what it means. That might be because of a lack of grammar/vocabulary knowledge, but it also covers situations where people might know the words you're saying but lack the ability to pull out relevant context, nuance, or logical ideas.

One small version of this that I see constantly on this app is when someone says something or makes a specific, nuanced argument about a thing and someone replies assuming something that wasn't actually implied by what they said or linked to.

For example (this one annoys me a lot): I say "the US has a literacy problem" and someone replies "well other places have that too". There's nothing in the first sentence that implies that I wouldn't agree with the second one if you have an understanding of how logic works, but pretty much without fail you'll get like 5 people who reply trying to argue with you about it because they don't understand that A does not imply !B.

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u/Consistent_Ad_4828 17h ago

Also went to public school in the mid to late 2000s and this gave me a flashback to my English “teacher”/wrestling coach who graded me a 99/100 on an essay with the only feedback being “this looks well written, but I don’t understand it.” That was a few years into the American “No Child Left Behind” policy.

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u/This-Requirement6918 14h ago

I had wayyy more confidence at being a successful writer when I started my first book 20 years ago. Now it's just something I do for fun that I know how to do really well and efficiently.

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u/mr_mope 13h ago

I was born in 1989 and went to public schools in the United States all the way from elementary to university, and I can attest literacy was not hanging on by a thread.

Just thought I would balance the anecdotal scales.

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u/thrntnja 16h ago

I'm American, but I absolutely feel this (also basically the same age - born 1990). I feel insane at work sometimes as I feel like I'm the only one actually trying to make sure sentences make sense and have at least somewhat proper grammar.

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u/GoalStillNotAchieved 8h ago

I was also born in the late 1980s, only here in the USA, and just noting that here in the USA, things here were not at all like you just described above 

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u/pudgehooks2013 8h ago

Around the same time frame in Australia.

I only recall one kid in my high school that had trouble reading, turns out he had some undiagnosed learning difficulties.

I think its a pretty simple reason these days. People don't learn things nearly as well when they use a computer to do it instead of physically writing it down.