College students in 2024 are less willing and able to read full books. Today, Explained asks whether that matters. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Boston University students relaxing. Photo by Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is social annotation and how is it used?
Have you heard of social annotation? It's kind of like the annotation you used to do in a textbook or a novel with a pencil or a pen, except now we're marking up the margins as a group on our screens with our machines. Social annotation is actually how we edit every episode of Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. But you know where else social annotation is huge?
on college campuses. Students are completing their reading assignments on social annotation apps where they can comment and ask questions in the digital margins of a reading assignment. And teachers can track how much time students spend with a given article, essay, or journal. And our old friend AI will even grade students' reading for teachers. And why would teachers need these kinds of tools?
Because college kids just aren't that into reading anymore. What on earth are we going to do about that? ahead on the show today.
Chapter 2: Why are college students reading less?
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You're listening to Today Explains. Is it Today Explain or Today Explains? Explain-da. Explain-da.
I'm Beth McMurtry, and I'm a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Okay. You're a senior writer, but we're here to talk to you about reading. Why are we talking to you about reading? What's going on with reading?
Sorry, are we starting, or you're just— This is it.
Yeah. It's so casual.
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.
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Chapter 3: What challenges are professors facing with student reading?
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.
And so I take it a class that might require students to read, what, four or five books? Is it functioning the way it used to when I was in college 15 years ago?
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.
Reading research articles may be a different type of reading than you are used to. This tutorial will help you create a strategy for reading and understanding this type of information.
They're substituting in news articles or essays. More professors are introducing videos.
Hey y'all, I'm Nick and this is my video blog and podcast.
I'm Noelle King.
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Chapter 4: How has the pandemic affected students' reading habits?
If you talk to or survey superintendents and teachers, they might say a significant portion of their students are doing more poorly on math and on English. So there has definitely been documented learning loss in K-12 that I think has been tied to the pandemic.
So is that an argument professors can make here? If nothing else, if you want to be as smart as your predecessors in your position, do the reading.
This generation is very self-critical. So telling students that they're dumb or dumber than previous generations, I think just feeds this spiral of anxiety. I don't think that's a way forward for anybody.
Okay, sorry.
I think we have to remember that the students didn't create this environment. We, the adults, created the environment and the system that they lived in, right? Like this is the result of our handiwork. So we kind of have to ask ourselves, if we're unhappy with...
that the skills and abilities students are coming out of high school with and coming into college with, do we care enough to change that?
Do you think this trend can be turned around?
When it comes to reading, I think it helps to take the long view. I thought it was interesting when I was reporting the story that a couple of different people talked about the shift from the oral to the written culture like thousands of years ago. When writing was first introduced, people mourned the loss of the oral culture, the oral tradition.
And they just thought of writing as like a negative. Like nobody would say that today. But the point is that if we're shifting to an oral slash written culture again, if we're shifting to a multimedia culture, what does that mean? What are we gaining even as we lose some of the deep reading that we have been used to doing?
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Chapter 5: What are the consequences of a declining reading culture?
Chapter 6: What data shows the impact on student knowledge?
And the truth is we don't know yet because we're just at the beginning of the shift.
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Chapter 7: Can we change the trend of declining reading skills?
Oh my goodness, probably somewhere between 50 and...
Fifty and seventy-five?
I have a reading life. I learned to bookend my day, which means I begin with a book and I end with a book.
Marianne is so big on reading, we had to ask, Professor, are you in the pocket of big book?
I don't know what it is.
We also asked her some questions she could answer, like why it seems that most people are choosing the opposite path she is when it comes to reading books.
You know, the repercussions of the digital culture are such that we never knew what I considered the... pernicious effects of the kind of efficiency that the digital screen gives us. So the book is the antithesis of the get it done and over with mode. Books have become like vinyl, you know, for though that Emily Dickinson would say for that select society, that shouldn't be the case.
I'm sure there's a lot of people in our audience who know exactly what you mean. But for all the people listening who need to be convinced that they're actually missing out on something... What do you think they're missing out on?
So, Sean, I'm going to answer in two modes. I'm going to answer as a cognitive neuroscientist who studies the reading brain. Okay. And I'm going to answer as a former English literature major. So I'm going to first start with the cognitive neuroscience. The reality is that no one on this earth was meant to read. The brain had to build up a new circuit.
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Chapter 8: What does the future hold for reading in a multimedia culture?
We have a frontal lobe dance in which we say, ah, this is what is meant. Oh, no, I refute this because it's not true. So we have this evaluation process, but it takes time. And the end is a real sense, whether it's true or not. misinformation, or worst of all, especially these days, intentional disinformation.
Now, the third deep reading process is one that doesn't always happen, and that's this almost like sanctuary feeling of being so immersed that, and this is where the novelist Proust comes in in my work, he said, the heart of reading is when we enter the wisdom of the author and go beyond it to discover our own wisdom, our own insights, our own best thoughts.
Most of the people who are not reading books aren't reading at that level. But from my perspective as an English literature major, they're not just skimming the information and getting just the gist. They're skimming the opportunity to enter another life.
Are we missing out when we read a dozen articles before we go to bed on our phone or first thing when we wake up? Are we missing out if we decide to listen to Moby Dick as an audiobook while we commute over the course of a month instead of sitting down and reading it every day when we get home from work?
So every single time I'm asked this question.
Oh no, someone's asked you that before?
Oh, for sure.
I blew it.
No, you ask it because, and I have answered it, because it is on the top of everyone's mind. I love audiobooks, and I especially like them for commuting or for, and I work with a lot of individuals with dyslexia. That's one of the best ways they can get information. Now, is it the same as reading at the immersive level? For some, it is. But by and large, it does skip what is called reading.
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