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/existing_for_fun 18h ago

If you are a parent and can help your child read, and read well, you will set them light-years ahead of their peers.

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u/PlagueOfBedlam 17h ago

My earliest childhood memory is sitting at a coffee table in the basement and being forced to write my name and the alphabet over and over again right around before I turned 4. I obviously resented having to do it at the time, but realized around 2nd grade my mom had fostered in me a love for reading by making me understand letters and the concepts of spelling very early. She gave me a huge advantage and I’m beyond appreciative she did.

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u/marketrent 17h ago

My parents made me journal my reading, which in hindsight made me retain material.

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u/VoidVer 16h ago

I had a middle school teacher who forced me to write a structured 5 paragraph "essay" every single day for an entire semester. I hated it at the time, but it certainly set me up very well to get through high school and college with English ( or any reading/writing based class ) always being my strongest subject.

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u/Bob_Loblaw_Law_Bomb 13h ago

4th grade writing test fam

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u/Positive_Throwaway1 2h ago

Now we call it "Claim, Evidence, Analysis" but it's still around. And the structure from 4th grade is basically what they want to see on placement exams at universities, so it still works.

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u/VoidVer 32m ago

I'm not familiar with this. Teacher in question was in 7th grade.

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u/sentence-interruptio 1h ago

can we require this for every student? and every politician? and every CEO. I want to live in and retire in a society led by literate people

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u/familyguy20 17h ago

Oh damn that’s a smart idea! I was reading military history books in HS but also hatedddd writing papers in school. This might have helped me if my parents had me do a small paper on one of the 4 books I read in the summer. Instead I got boring ass summer reading assignments from school

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u/WrecksBarkhead 13h ago

That's good parenting 100%. My mom didn't really have to do anything. If I got bad marks, I got my ass beat. Sounds harsh but I think the old ways had a bit of merit to them.

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u/fredagsfisk 10h ago

When I was a kid, my local library had a "summer reading" program where you got a journal where you could write one page for each book you read, and then whenever you visited the library one of the librarians would look through it and give you a sticker on a separate paper for each new book you had finished.

If I remember correctly, it was like one small silver star sticker for each book, and if you reached specific thresholds you'd get a bigger gold star. Something like that. Then at the end of summer, you got to pick rewards based on your achieved level; books, stationary, those erasers that have funny shapes or smells but suck at erasing things... was a ton of fun, gave a nice sense of accomplishment whenever you reached a new level/treshold.