Beth McMurtry
speaker
34 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Beth McMurtry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I'm Beth McMurtry, and I'm a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Sorry, are we starting, or you're just— This is it.
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 students simply aren't doing the reading.
A lot of professors are finding that if 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.
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.
They're substituting in news articles or essays. More professors are introducing videos.
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.
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.
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.
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, give everybody at least a 50%, 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 the school year, maybe even writing book reports or writing essays.
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