Those who worry about the reading habits of today’s college students can take heart: They may be reading more than is commonly thought.
However, more than 40 percent of the time they spend reading is on social media, and that reading often happens during class, a new study reveals.
“We need to be aware of students’ reading habits because they have changed,” said SuHua Huang, author of “Reading Habits of College Students in the United States,” which was presented on Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
“As professors,” she said, “we have to update our teaching methods and integrate technology and use social media in the lecture.”
The idea for the study arose because Ms. Huang, an assistant professor of reading education at Midwestern State University, in Texas, perceived that her students did not care much for reading. She wanted to see if those attitudes could be borne out empirically.
She collaborated with Phillip Jeffrey Blacklock and Matthew Capps, who are, respectively, assistant and associate professors of education at Midwestern State, to perform a mixed-methods study.
They asked 1,265 students across disciplinary areas at a public liberal-arts university in the Southwest to fill out surveys describing how much time they spent each week engaging in things like academic reading, extracurricular reading, browsing the Internet, working, sleeping, and socializing. Students selected the time span that best quantified each activity, with the range starting at zero, increasing to one to four hours, and proceeding in five-hour increments to 36 to 40 hours.
Ms. Huang and her colleagues followed up by interviewing 12 of the students and observing their reading behavior in three education classes.
The quantitative data revealed that students spent nearly 21 hours reading each week: 8.9 hours on the Internet, 7.7 hours on academic reading, and 4.2 hours on extracurricular reading, including the news, graphic novels, and nonacademic books.
Those numbers are lower than similar recent research has found, but far higher than data produced by the federal government in 2007.
Internet as Social Media
Separating the “Internet” from other categories of reading can get dicey in studies such as these. It is, after all, a mode of delivery, while the other categories describe the intent behind the reading. Students may also do some of their academic or extracurricular reading on the Internet.
Ms. Huang said the categories in her study did not blur much. A separate analysis of the same data, which she said will appear in a forthcoming paper, indicated that when students answered “Internet,” they were referring chiefly to using social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
A different study that looked at Internet usage relative to various types of reading suggested that the Internet was seldom a means for students to read materials that were assigned for class. In a 2009 study published in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Kouider Mokhtari, of the University of Texas at Tyler, found that students most commonly used the Internet for e-mail or for instant messaging. Nearly half of the respondents used it to conduct research.
Mr. Mokhtari, the lead author of the study, based his results on time diaries that were filled out by students. His respondents described spending nearly 11 hours on academic reading and close to six hours on extracurricular reading each week, levels about 35 percent higher than those Ms. Huang found. She thought the discrepancy might be due to additional activities, such as work and socializing, that she surveyed and the range of time scales provided. Mr. Mokhtari’s sample was also less than half as large.
Other studies have painted an alarming picture of students’ reading habits. In 2007 the National Endowment for the Arts, for instance, described Americans between the ages of 15 and 34 as spending, on average, about one hour per week reading. The share of adults between 18 and 24 who read literature had dropped by 17 percentage points over the two preceding decades, the NEA found. Reading proficiency and literacy skills among baccalaureate degree holders also slipped.
‘Point of Obsession’
Although the qualitative part of Ms. Huang’s study focused on a small number of students, it yielded no shortage of findings that would strike faculty members as both familiar and disturbing.
Students said in interviews that reading textbooks was “tedious” and “time-consuming.” Some said they did not read the textbooks if they did not need them for examinations.
Her observations revealed that students seemed to have difficulty putting away their Internet-capable cellphones during class, often keeping them on their laps or in their hands. Some students explained that they needed to do so to keep from missing a message from family members or friends or to pick up extra hours at their jobs.
Cellphone usage in class became so ubiquitous that Ms. Huang said it “reached the point of obsession.” Few of the students she observed followed instructions, took notes, or brought their textbooks to class.
“Many students often asked repeatedly how to do assignments even though the instructors explained several times,” Ms. Huang wrote. Some students completed their assignments and sent them to their instructors in the middle of class.
Rather than outlawing technology in class, Ms. Huang is choosing to embrace its potential in hopes of cultivating more enjoyment of reading. She is experimenting with running a book group on Facebook, where her students can discuss their class reading.
“It’s a good way to promote reading for pleasure,” she said, “not just for exams.”
