Is This the End of Reading?

Theresa MacPhail is a pragmatist. In her 15 years of teaching, as the number of students who complete their reading assignments has steadily declined, she has adapted. She began assigning fewer readings, then fewer still. Less is more, she reasoned. She would focus on the readings that mattered most and were interesting to them.

For a while, that seemed to work. But then things started to take a turn for the worse. Most students still weren’t doing the reading. And when they were, more and more struggled to understand it. Some simply gave up. Their distraction levels went “through the roof,” MacPhail said. They had trouble following her instructions. And sometimes, students said her expectations — such as writing a final research paper with at least 25 sources — were unreasonable.

Teaching Gen Z

Anuj Shrestha for The Chronicle

Learn more about how today’s traditional-age college students experience the world — and how it affects their education — with It’s Not All About the Money by Scott Carlson of The Chronicle and Ned Laff.

MacPhail, an associate professor in the program of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology, teaches courses on topics such as global health, medical humanities, and anthropology. She discusses this problem regularly with her colleagues. If you design a class based on the assumption that students will do the readings, you’ll get nowhere. If you make it easier, and go over what they should have read in class, students will participate. But then what are you doing, other than entertaining?

She has long followed the mantra “meet your students where they are.” But she says if she meets them any further down, she’ll feel like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.

Academics across the country are talking about the reading problems they are seeing among traditional-age students. Many, they say, don’t see the point in doing much work outside of class. Some struggle with reading endurance and weak vocabulary. A lack of faith in their own academic abilities leads some students to freeze and avoid doing the work altogether.

And a significant number of those who do the work seem unable to analyze complex or lengthy texts. Their limited experience with reading also means they don’t have the context to understand certain arguments or points of view.

These struggles are not limited to a particular type of student or college. This is a cohort, after all, that has had smartphones in their pockets since middle school, survived pandemic high school, and faces a future that appears, to many of them, fractured and hopeless.

Nicholaus Gutierrez teaches cinema and media studies at Wellesley College, where the average student scored above 1400 on the SAT. The baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped noticeably, he says, and he has reduced course readings accordingly. They also struggle to write at length. In a world of truncated communication, a 750-word essay feels long.

The challenge is not limited to courses in the humanities and social sciences, either.

Sophia Sarafova, an associate professor of biology at Davidson College, notes that at the start of her teaching career, 18 years ago, new students were able to synthesize and summarize information from multiple lectures on a topic to extract general principles they could apply in new situations.

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“Not anymore,” she says. “We spend a lot of time learning in class and during recitation how to identify categories of information in the text, how to organize them in a table, and how to shift perspective such that we can observe a pattern.”

That difficulty in processing information seeps into other functions as well, Sarafova says. “Note-taking now requires specific instruction on what to write down and how to organize it. Also, a lot of students are unable to rephrase a statement without changing the meaning, often in drastic ways that clearly contradict the core of the statement.”

Andrew Tobolowsky, an associate professor of religious studies at the College of William and Mary, sees a deeper irony here.

If college-level skills are declining, he asks, “of what use have all the pedagogical consultants and all the emphasis on teaching to the test been [in public schools]?” Meanwhile, he points out, the college professors finding it necessary to teach these skills have more students, more service responsibilities, more classes, and less security than ever.

In short, professors say students are coming into college with a host of new and alarming learning challenges, including fragmented and distracted thinking, along with sharper limits on what they are willing or able to do. What do you do when students don’t — or can’t — do the work?

It seems like professors have always complained about students not doing the reading or not reading in depth. And they have often been right. One study published in 2000 found that just 20 percent of students normally did their class reading in 1997 — down from 80 percent in 1981. Another study, published in 2013, found that research papers written by first-year students largely used sources superficially, often quoting from the first or second page and citing just a couple of sentences.

But in a widely read essay for Slate magazine published in February, Adam Kotsko argued that the literacy crisis he has seen among his students is different. He describes it as a “conspiracy without conspirators.” No one deliberately set out to design a system in which students were not taught the skills they need to become effective readers, critical thinkers, and cogent writers, he believes. But that is the result.

Kotsko, an assistant professor who teaches in a Great Books program at North Central College, began noticing changing student behaviors around 2019. “Even students who clearly did the work and wanted to do the work were responding to the reading in a way that was odd and ungrounded in what was said,” he said in a follow-up interview with The Chronicle, “as though they had grabbed onto a couple of points in isolation.”

What accounts for these changes? Kotsko and others point to several drivers.

A decline in academic expectations during and after the pandemic has led to learning loss, recent assessments show. A 2023 EdWeek Research Center survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school officials described the loss of learning in English and language arts as severe or very severe. And 15 percent said the same about social studies.

Additionally, a generation of students may have been harmed by problematic reading-instruction strategies used in many elementary schools. Rather than learning the building blocks of words through phonics, they were taught to rely on context clues — an approach not backed by research.

Testing culture also discourages deep reading, critics say, because it emphasizes close reading of excerpts, for example, to study a particular literary technique, rather than reading entire works.

Young people are reading less for pleasure, too. In 2020, only 17 percent of 13-year-olds surveyed said they read for fun almost every day. That figure was 27 percent in 2012 and 35 percent when data collection began in 1984, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The ubiquity of smartphones and social media have also affected literacy across the board. Children and adults alike are reading in fundamentally different ways. For one, phones have been shown — to no one’s surprise — to interfere with our ability to focus. And apps such as TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram have shifted our reading habits toward short and often fragmentary text.

How much each of these influences has shaped today’s students, though, is up for debate. Is reading comprehension declining because of the way reading is taught? Or is it because students are learning less about history and science and thus lack context for what they do read? And is social-media use necessarily bad if students are creating and consuming new forms of communication that emphasize visual and auditory literacy?

Meanwhile, not many young people or parents surveyed in 2023 expressed deep concern about college readiness or academic well-being, which suggests students may be coming into college assuming they have been well prepared for college-level work. Part of that misunderstanding may be due to changes to grading during the pandemic that made it appear students had learned effectively, despite a growing gap between high-school grades and standardized-test scores.

“I have a lot of students who think they’ve already mastered the art [of writing], and other students who’ve never been required to really try,” says Gutierrez, the Wellesley professor, who attributes students’ declining literacy skills to minimal writing requirements in high school and receiving good grades for mediocre work. “And then when you throw in the communication cultures that they already exist in, at least to me, a picture starts to emerge which shows a pretty clear and consistent message that our culture implicitly makes: The kind of writing I might ask of my students isn’t that important.”

Jonikka Charlton, senior vice provost for student success and academic affairs at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley, has seen these trends play out on her campus. The number of entering students who did not meet at least one of the measures in the Texas Standard of Readiness — which evaluates their abilities in reading, writing and math — hit 25 percent in the fall of 2023, says Charlton. In 2019, that figure was 10 percent.

Professors tell her that students are doing less academic work outside of class. She attributes that to their hectic lives, in which, on any given day, school may not be their first priority.

“They want a very specific roadmap,” Charlton says of undergraduates. “They don’t necessarily want to have to go to class face-to-face. They want to know exactly what they need to do to be successful in the course, but they want to put in the minimum amount to sort of check the box. ‘I did this assignment. I did the thing I have to do. And that’s it. I’ve given all I have to give.’”

Students’ declining willingness to put time into their coursework may be related to the way homework has been treated in some middle and high schools, some professors say. In recent years, and especially during the pandemic, some school districts adopted what’s known as “equitable grading practices.”

As part of that movement, some set minimum grades at 50 percent instead of zero and removed penalties for late work, among other shifts. The idea was to provide a safety net for struggling students who would benefit from additional chances to succeed: It’s much harder to rebuild your GPA from a zero, after all, than from a 50.

But critics argue that such an approach can backfire, because, if done poorly, it conveys to students that deadlines, homework, and effort don’t matter. Earlier this year, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-policy group, laid out such a critique, arguing that the practices “lower academic standards and are likely to do long-term damage to the educational equity their advocates purport to advance.”

Melissa Rich, a freshman at Stevens Institute of Technology, says she felt the effects of lowered expectations in her own high-school classes during the pandemic. “I used to be, in middle school at least, the kid that would always get stuff in on time and cared a lot about my classes,” says Rich, who was in ninth grade when Covid hit. “The pandemic changed the way I worked. It definitely stunted me a little bit.”

A marine-biology class she took in high school consisted of worksheets. A geometry teacher would let students use a tutoring platform during tests to figure out answers. “I take responsibility for this. I can’t say it’s the teacher’s fault for not pushing me hard enough,” she says, “but when people would just let us do anything, I did not feel motivated to do extra work for classes I wasn’t passionate about.”

Cesar Chavez, a sophomore at California State University at Los Angeles, also found that his motivation dropped when classes went online during his sophomore and junior years of high school. “I’d lay in bed and watch Netflix movies, probably go on YouTube a little bit,” he recalls. “And then the work I did, I cheated on all of it.” He is still struggling with the aftermath, finding it harder to talk to his classmates, feel connected to his college, and find meaning in his courses. “It’s more like I have to do it,” he says, “than I want to do it.”

Troy E. Spier, an assistant professor of English and linguistics at Florida A&M University, used to teach middle and high school. When he began his last stint as a high-school teacher in 2018, he recalls being told that he had to give students 50 percent on homework, even if they had not submitted it, and that he couldn’t give anyone lower than a C on an assignment. He, too, has been troubled by such changes. “I have a lot more students who come into college who got an A in their senior English class and expect to get an A here, as well. But they realized pretty quickly that the A they earned in high school was not [even] a C in college.”

Still, Spier doesn’t think those changes alone account for students’ weak reading and writing skills. More concerning, he says, is that parents don’t seem to be reading as much to their children or modeling good reading habits themselves. According to Gallup, Americans are reading fewer books on average than in the past, with college graduates showing the steepest decline.

For years, Spier has asked his first-semester composition students to write a personal literacy narrative. They used to tell stories of parents reading to them at night or taking them to the library or reading a newspaper at the table. Now those narratives describe how students read posts on Twitter or Instagram or comments on TikTok.

“I almost can’t blame them for not being interested in reading,” he says, “if they’re not around people who are reading, and if the only sort of outlets they have for reading are directly associated with some sort of standardized test or grade.”

Spier thinks too many people are getting caught up in the argument that Covid changed everything. “When you use Covid as the excuse or the reason, then you almost don’t have to come up with a solution, because you just acknowledge that this was something that globally impacted everyone,” he says. The default seems to be, “‘We’re all seeing issues and so all we have to do is sort of fight back to where we were.’ But the truth is that where we were wasn’t that great either.”

One of Kotsko’s students, N. Klepczarek, echoes that view. Klepczarek, who is 23, says they went to an academically excellent high school in Illinois, studied hard, and got good grades. But it came at a cost. They recall that “there was no room for my creative side at all in high school,” which “taught us that reading has to be work. It has to have a grade assigned to it. I was largely deterred from reading for entertainment. I almost never read any books for fun.”

Or perhaps higher education is to blame. Some professors say their own colleagues have fueled students’ antipathy toward reading.

They criticized instructors who tell students that everything they need to know will be on the PowerPoint slides they present in class, or who assign readings for no apparent reason — they’re never mentioned in class, and students are never tested on the material. Too often, the readings themselves are deadly dull.

“Have you read a textbook?” asks Susan D. Blum, an anthropology professor at the University of Notre Dame. “They’re really boring.”

Blum recently discussed the argument of Kotsko’s Slate article with her students, who objected to the idea that their generation has lost the ability to read critically. “We have narrowed the definition of reading to a certain kind of material,” she says — namely, textbooks and academic articles — “and then we have drawn the conclusion that they can’t read or they won’t read.”

Blum, who has written about how stultifying traditional schooling is to many students, has embraced new forms of communication in her courses, turning to video or podcasts when it seems appropriate. While she is as critical as many of her peers are of the way reading is taught in schools — encouraging students to mine texts to perform well on standardized tests — she also thinks educators should consider presenting information through other forms of media when planning their courses. “If over and over and over again there’s a problem with what you’re asking students to do, then consider doing something else.”

Students The Chronicle talked to agreed that while distraction and disengagement is a constant challenge, college doesn’t necessarily help.

Chavez, the Cal State student, who is majoring in sociology and plays on his college baseball team, says his classes often aren’t interesting enough to hold his attention. “I feel like professors don’t really care enough to make a connection,” he says. “A lot of times they put the notes online, and then they’ll say the notes in class and then tell you to go home.”

MacPhail, the Stevens Institute of Technology professor, raises another issue that many other professors have noticed getting worse over the past two to three years: Students increasingly feel overwhelmed. Then “it’s a fight or flight scenario,” she says, “where a lot of them just stop doing the work.”

“They’re thinking, ‘I failed,’ and they’re just not turning in anything,” she says. “That’s really what’s starting to concern me. They’re not adaptive to stress anymore.”

Some broader research supports MacPhail’s observations.

Stephanie Stama, assistant director of community education and outreach in the department of counseling and psychological services at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, points to a study that documents notable changes in people’s personality traits during the height of the pandemic. Through surveys, researchers measured traits such as neuroticism, openness, extraversion, and agreeableness. Among younger adults, neuroticism increased, while agreeableness and conscientiousness decreased. The degree of change was something that would normally take place over the span of 10 years, she says, “but seen in a short time frame.”

According to Penn State’s Center for Collegiate Mental Health, which tracks students who seek counseling on their campuses, rates of generalized anxiety and social anxiety have moved steadily upward since 2010. So, while the pandemic certainly exacerbated students’ anxiety, those trend lines were climbing before it hit.

Brett Scofield, executive director of the center, noted that social media may contribute to this dynamic by encouraging students to constantly compare themselves to the people they see on their screens. Students with social anxiety, he notes, are increasingly likely to report that they fear people may not like them and that they feel self-conscious around others.

These changes in behaviors, outlooks, and personality traits connect to another national trend: Americans are increasingly isolated and losing social connections.

People of all ages are spending far more time alone, as engagement with friends and others outside their households has dropped significantly in recent years, according to a report by the U.S. surgeon general called “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” That time in person is often replaced with time online. On average, adult internet users spend more than six hours a day online. And about one in three adults 18 and older say they’re online almost constantly.

Julianne Holt-Lunstad, director of the Social Connection and Health Lab at Brigham Young University and a professor of psychology and neuroscience, led the scientific research in the surgeon general’s report. She notes that social support helps buffer the negative effects of stress, meaning that if we spend more time by ourselves, we may feel stress more acutely.

“It’s always been a vulnerable place to be if you’re alone or outside the group, and that’s kind of an adaptive response,” she says. “It heightens the sense of threat.”

Gabriel Rubin, a professor of justice studies at Montclair State University, has been exploring this topic through dozens of in-depth interviews with college students. He wanted to understand a seeming paradox: Even though we live in a relatively safe time — with life expectancies steadily increasing — young people are consumed with worry and see risks and existential danger all around them.

Rubin came away from these interviews struck by how different Generation Z’s experiences have been. They are a complex and diverse group, he notes. They’re aware that they often retreat into online worlds, and they criticize their own generation for being lazy or having lost motivation. They consider themselves progressive and activist, but they are increasingly skeptical that they can effect change. They are cynical but desperate for meaning. “They vacillate between this great pride in themselves,” Rubin says, “and hopelessness and just feeling defeated.”

As for why they may not show up for class or do the work, Rubin thinks it’s part social anxiety and part cynicism. “I think they see school very transactionally,” he says. “Schools also see students more transactionally than they did in the past. It’s not the deep relationship educators want it to be.”

Gutierrez, the Wellesley professor, echoes Rubin’s views. “No one should be shaming students for the circumstances they are in. The students are not the problem; the wicked circumstances of the pandemic combined with a host of institutional failures are the problem.”

Because this is uncharted territory, he adds, professors can’t rely on their own experiences as students for solutions. Finding a way forward takes energy. “It’s a burden that previous generations of teachers did not have to bear — at least not to the same extent.”

For many professors, teaching seems to be at an inflection point. But which direction it’s headed is anyone’s guess. Will college become even more like high school? Will textbooks be replaced by podcasts? Will students’ thinking, writing, and reading become even more fragmented, requiring further changes in the classroom?

“We all kind of feel lost these days, myself included,” says MacPhail. Administrators don’t seem to be aware of the magnitude of the problem, she says, nor are parents or the general public. “I keep coming back to: There’s something broken in American culture. We pay lip service to education, but we’re not giving people who educate any resources or power to discipline.”

MacPhail praises foundational courses designed to teach students how to read critically and write a college-level analytical paper. They are immensely valuable, she says, but they are typically taught by non-tenure-track instructors who are under a lot of stress.

Other professors share her frustration at the lack of collective attention. Several note that their campuses have reduced writing-intensive courses or writing requirements in their general-education programs. Some say that administrators are more focused on keeping up enrollments than addressing these core academic challenges. As a result, they feel like they’re fighting a rising tide.

“The college has its head in the sand, insisting we have world-class students despite my colleagues’ and my concerns about dubious literacy skills,” one assistant teaching professor of organic chemistry at a highly competitive university wrote in response to a Chronicle survey, requesting anonymity. “I don’t know what to do — students with a lack of functional literacy fall behind and behind, and my load of hundreds of students is too great to give all individual attention.”

So professors are working on their own to find a way forward. Some have challenged students to push past obstacles. Spier, the former secondary-school teacher, has actually increased the amount of readings in his English-composition courses. His classes are tech-free, he gives quizzes on the reading, and he doesn’t allow students to stay in class on days they have not completed it. He also talks to students about what it means to engage with an author’s ideas.

A key to his success, Spier believes, is building a rapport with students and engaging them in meaningful discussions, while also maintaining high standards so they know they earned the grade they got. Until now, he says, “they haven’t necessarily had high expectations to which they need to rise.”

When asked what makes a difference, students who have struggled with motivation often point to the same thing: having someone who is invested in their success.

For Klepczarek, Kotsko is one of those people. Klepczarek would often approach him after class and confess to struggling with the reading. And when Klepczarek decided to form a study group, they say, Kotsko “admired my ability to take a leadership role.”

MacPhail has created a course on failure, aiming to help students find better ways to think about facing their problems than the more common tactic of avoidance. It’s the one class where she doesn’t have to struggle to get students to read. “I assign a book a week,” she says. “I tell them that it’s important for them to tackle big assignments and learn how to get by, even if they can’t manage to read everything.”

What gives MacPhail hope is that, when she can break through the stress and cynicism that has so affected this generation, she likes what she sees. “When they buy into something, they can be very creative and work hard. If they can see the point, they are eager to put that to use. They are a little bit more world-savvy than I think I was.”

Rich, the Stevens student, has been energized by something called the Leadership Lab, which is taught through her ROTC program. For two hours every Friday morning, she is put into situations that an officer would be expected to handle. Students learn expeditionary skills or how to handle an unexploded ordnance. She thinks it would be great if all first-year students could experience something like that, “where you’re put into situations and forced to make choices rather than when you listen to someone talk.”

Other professors focus on teaching foundational reading skills by scaffolding them into regular assignments or providing reading guides that help students learn to pull out key ideas. And they quiz students on what they read so they know it matters. Chris Hakala, a psychology professor at Springfield College and head of the campus teaching center, uses group work and discussion to build a culture of reading among his students. He has them read aloud in class. They talk about the purpose and value of the readings, and he teaches strategies for things like deciphering the structure of challenging empirical articles. “Students will read,” he says, “if they know why they are doing it and time is taken to help them begin to develop an approach that is effective.”

Teamwork would motivate Chavez, the Cal State student, too. “In baseball I have a coach. You need the coach to really care about you to feel like you’re enough for that team and work together,” he says. “But in the classroom setting, the professor is just up there teaching without knowing who the actual person is.”

Were professors’ former expectations unrealistic? That’s what Kotsko, author of the Slate article, has wondered. He has become much more hands-on in his classes, asking students to annotate their reading and then upload the pages so he can offer advice on what they might do differently. He gets through far less reading than in years past, and that worries him, he says. If he were to try to teach a course around the Odyssey, which he hasn’t done for five years, could students keep up? But other times, less has turned out to be more. “Students find Aristotle very difficult to read,” he says. “And cutting that down has actually made class better, made the teaching of Aristotle better.”

Stuart Patterson, chair of the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College and a colleague of Kotsko’s, is taking the long view, discussing with students and others what the future will look like and how to prepare for it. Just as the introduction of writing led to the decline of oral culture, the shift toward truncated writing, along with the rise of audio and video, will shift communication once again, he says — and in an equally profound way.

“The change in media environments, where we’re entering into a hybrid oral-written culture, is a much longer-term change that is in some ways more important” than any change brought about by the pandemic or testing culture, Patterson says. “We need to prepare ourselves for a drastically different future.”

He doubts it will be easy, and this future may not be better — just different. “If it means listening, rather than reading, OK, that’s where we’re headed. That’s what I try to be open-minded about. Humanity is going to take its course no matter what I try to do about it.”