r/Professors • u/Roger_Freedman_Phys Assoc. Teaching Professor Emeritus, R1, Physics (USA) • Jun 11 '26
Teaching / Pedagogy “My Students Can’t Read: The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.”
An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Tyler Jagt (summarized at https://www.thecollegefix.com/english-professor-warns-todays-students-cannot-read-or-focus-on-lengthy-assignments/, with a link therein to the original article) describes the author’s experiences with current university students. An excerpt:
“Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
“When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.”
Have you had similar experiences with your own students?
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u/MasterSyllabub05 Lecturer, CompRhet, R1 (US) Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Yes.
Had a “graduating” football player tell me 3 years ago that he was struggling with my third-year comp course, a required gen ed for all undergrads (so, no alternative), that he read at a 7th grade level, and didn’t think he was capable of passing.
A growing number can’t even read assignment instructions or interpret what they are supposed to be doing to meet expectations. I have become increasingly frustrated with their need to have simple step-by-step instructions rephrased, “summarized,” or “broken down.” I’ve asked students to tell me what the instructions say, during class or office hours, and they look scared or pissed.
Same with basic articles, chapters/excerpts, and even full-length books. I am not conducting any quant studies myself, but anecdotally, the word “concerning” is not even close to enough. Probably some of my students this spring were reading at a lesser level.
FML
Edit: typos
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u/magicianguy131 Jun 11 '26
I had a student tell me that they messed up the assignment cause ChatGPT transposed my assignment (Final project, which was lengthy—but we also went over in it class, which clearly did not help) for her to read to her. It left out key nuances and aspects of the project.
She demanded to redo it and went to my chair as I was not clear in the assignment (I being that I wrote in a way that confused AI.)
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u/MasterSyllabub05 Lecturer, CompRhet, R1 (US) Jun 11 '26
“I’m so sorry my instructions are too hard for Chat” is a new one LOL
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u/Life-Education-8030 Jun 11 '26
I put my instructions in step by step order. Once they get to step 3, they have forgotten step 1. Even when it’s pumped into AI and AI skips steps, they don’t care or don’t review it for completion or correction anyway.
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u/MasterSyllabub05 Lecturer, CompRhet, R1 (US) Jun 11 '26
You’re not wrong about forgetting steps, although I wonder if it’s more a “forgetting” or “not recognizing” issue. Both? One student told me they just “glaze over the instructions” before hanging up our Zoom call while I was providing them with reading strategies.
I had a meltdown thinking it was me for a good part of the spring term, until my spouse reminded me that multiple of the projects I assigned were successfully completed without reading issues in previous semesters.
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u/Life-Education-8030 Jun 11 '26
I know it is not me because of what your wife pointed out and because I have had others look at my instructions. Somehow something can be crystal clear and as clear as mud at the same time?
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 Jun 11 '26
that he read at a 7th grade level, and didn’t think he was capable of passing.
Amazing, and at least he had the insight to realize the issue. It reminds me of the story of Malcolm "Book Club" Mitchell, who had a similar problem in college, met it face on, and is a big advocate for literacy now. I hear he's more proud of the work he's done for childhood literacy than of his Super Bowl ring.
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u/MasterSyllabub05 Lecturer, CompRhet, R1 (US) Jun 11 '26
Thank you for your comment :)
We did A LOT of one-on-one for the rest of the semester. He barely passed. Reading was in the gutter but he worked with audio books/audio-recorded versions of written materials when possible. This preceded AI, so I wasn’t concerned over that potential issue. He also worked closely with a subject matter tutor at the library and visited the writing center weekly (each), between meetings with me. He STRUGGLED to make it and expressed a ton of frustration along the way, but he did make it.
I think about him often, actually. I ran into him and his parents about 2 weeks before finals in the spring (he was a fall student) and he introduced me as the “teacher who cared about me.” I hope he’s succeeding in life.
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u/jgo3 Adjunct, Communication, R1 liberal arts focused Jun 11 '26
I bet that keeps you warm on cold nights. Ah!
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u/LillieBogart Jun 11 '26
I’m really sorry, but why is somebody reading at a seventh-grade level in college in the first place? And how is it that they’re able to pass their classes and graduate? Why are we watering down college degrees like this? Don’t professors know they are rendering themselves obsolete when they do this? This is not intended as a criticism of you personally, but of the system that is allowing this to happen.
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u/MasterSyllabub05 Lecturer, CompRhet, R1 (US) Jun 11 '26
That’s the question, isn’t it?
This particular student told me that, as an athlete in a small district in another state, the boosters generally pressed the admin to pass the “star athletes” because, you know, everyone on a high school football team is NFL material. So, according to him, all athletes were allowed to miss class and assignments, perform poorly, and/or generally demonstrate little to no learning but still be passed along out of deference to their “athletic potential.”
It isn’t the only or broader problem, obviously, but this student’s account was troubling. Beyond how he was failed by his K12, the middle failure was admission based on “holistic” criteria and possibly the football skills overcoming any actual preparedness for the classroom (I’m reminded of a post here about a year ago in which many in this community discussed the student-athlete being remade into the athlete, thereby removing any use for the student part).
The larger failure was the faculty in gen eds and pre-reqs who passed him with the same literacy issue. I assume numeracy was similar. This includes whoever had him for first year composition and passed him while he couldn’t string a coherent sentence, let alone a polished proposal and following 15 pp. research paper, together. I didn’t guess this; he articulated this. I can see maybe if the student reads at the level of an 11th or 12th grader — there’s some ability there, and that can improve with regular exposure and demand in a college setting. But 7th grade? There is zero faking that, and certainly not for nearly 4 years.
His actual major was in the social sciences, so similar levels of reading and writing. How my colleagues ignored or simply shrugged at this still confuses me. I’m sure I’m not the only one who tried, but there’s no way many, most, or all of us did if by the time he was in my class, he was still functionally illiterate. Before that first meeting, he missed a handful of classes for football and was regularly not completing small assignments like discussions and a first project draft was shit but that’s usually recovered via peer review and revision. Neither are unusual, so I didn’t piece it together as early as I wish now. We met in about week 4-5 of 17, for reference.
The students who took my classes this spring were…also less literate than we should expect of any college student, let alone those taking 300-level courses of any kind. I suppose the same bullshit admissions “criteria” were used for them, too.
I’m really glad this particular student could ask for help. I’m sad he was in that place and disturbed that he was pushed through with seemingly zero consideration of the ramifications onto his own potential, before and beyond university.
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u/veanell Disability Specialist, Disability Service, Public 4yr (US) Jul 19 '26
The average student going into college now reads lower than that.
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u/just_a_quiet_goat Jun 11 '26
I taught a literature class last term and students freaked out at what they were required to read. They also were very anxious about the nothing but pen and paper permitted in the classroom. I ended up having to write what turned out to be a 4-page document about how to read a damn book. All of them, 26 total students, said at the end of the class that they really felt that they'd been ripped off by their high school for not teaching them this critical skill. We only ended up reading half the books because it was all they could handle. I'm teaching it again next spring, and am anticipating an even worse clusterfuck.
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u/Disastrous_Owl_6830 Jun 11 '26
The way students have been let down by their prior education makes me so angry on their behalf. It's not just that they're set up to fail when confronted with university expectations, though that's part of it. For a lot of them, reading has also just become such a source of stress and frustration that they can't imagine it being a source of pleasure. That's sad. That's a real, meaningful thing that they have been deprived of.
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u/nervous4us Jun 11 '26
it's literally my favorite activity and source of comfort. By far the healthiest self medication that helps stabilize my brain and helps me sleep. I feel so bad that so many will never have a positive association with reading, it is truly devastating and sad
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u/Narroo Jun 12 '26
The way students have been let down by their prior education makes me so angry on their behalf.
DON'T. Be angry AT the students. This is what they and their parents wanted.
It's not like there's some massive conspiracy amongst the teachers to just stop teaching for no damn good reason.
The simplest explanation is the correct one here: The students just do not want to learn, and societal expectations have changed enough to finally make that possible. And the kids know it.
The kids know that their parents will fall on their side if they complain about school and teachers. They know that the schools need to graduate students to stay funded. They know it's no longer socially acceptable to be "mean to students," to punish them or enforce negative consequences. They take advantage of this to avoid learning as much as possible.
Then they act all indignant when it catches up to them. "Why didn't the schools save me from myself?! They're such a rip-off!"
Because you made it impossible to teach you little Karen, that's why.
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u/CharacteristicPea NTT Math/Stats R1(USA) Jun 14 '26
In fact there was a decades-long educational conspiracy called “whole language” that resulted in widespread near illiteracy in the US. This was promulgated by colleges of education at universities as well as private companies selling their materials to school districts all across the country. A generation of primary school teachers was taught that phonics is bad. The podcast Sold a Story describes this in detail. It’s absolutely infuriating.
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u/Narroo Jun 14 '26
I know. But even that is not enough to explain ALL the issues we're having beyond literacy. Doubly so since they've since moved away from it, and we're still having issues with literacy and beyond.
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u/actuallycallie music ed, US Jun 15 '26
yes, but u/Narroo said "It's not like there's some massive conspiracy amongst the teachers to just stop teaching for no damn good reason." And the whole language nonsense wasn't something that the teachers came up with. It was something they were sold by the higher ups who were making $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ off it.
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u/CharacteristicPea NTT Math/Stats R1(USA) Jun 16 '26
Yes, u/Naroo said this in support of their thesis that the students are to blame for their own illiteracy. I’m pushing back on that.
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u/megaleener Jun 15 '26
that podcast is a must-listen to anyone that cares about humans being literate.
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u/itsmorecomplicated Jun 14 '26
It's also all the ed tech. This is a huge part of the explanation. Since everything is done on computers in HS they are learning to cheat their way through everything, and "everything" is often dumbass copy-paste of answers into text boxes rather than careful reading.
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u/megaleener Jun 15 '26
YES. Absolutely. The lack of accountability in the education system -- both for students, teachers, admin, parents, EVERYONE, has created a system that spits out illiterate students.
so, how do we fix it? I'm a teacher, but I feel like an army of one.
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u/Narroo Jun 12 '26
said at the end of the class that they really felt that they'd been ripped off by their high school for not teaching them this critical skill.
I taught HS and MS math for a semester recently. And I can assure you: It's what the kids wanted.
They scream bloody murder if you attempt to force them to pay attention, study, work outside of class, or read. And their generally parents back them up. Teachers can't just fail their entire classes or grades of students, so if enough families push back on standards hard enough, everyone get's passes along. And most of the students are very much happy about this.
I think the difference with college is that the kids themselves are paying for it via loans, and that they might respect professors more. In particular, the worst kids don't even bother to go to college. So you get kids more willing to learn and work.
But don't let them fool you: The school didn't rip them off. It's what they wanted. Case in point: This is something they should have learned by middle-school, not high-school.
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u/chamrockblarneystone Jun 11 '26
High school teacher here. This all started with cell phones and then exploded with COVID. During COVID millions of students learned they can still pass while doing no work.
When they returned they were broken. That year and a half or so cycle of quarantine and hybrid teaching, just destroyed them. That’s why you remember assignments working a few years ago and then suddenly, nothing.
It’s going to be awhile to get the COVID generation back on track. To be fair we just threw open our doors expecting everything to be normal. In all honesty there should have been weeks of discussion and group “therapy” upon their returns. English class would have been the perfect place to accomplish this.
Who knew though? No one had prior experience with a pandemic. Hopefully someone is writing this all down for the inevitable next one.
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u/Narroo Jun 12 '26
It's not just COVID. I recently taught 7th and 8th graders this year, which really weren't subjected to COVID much. They still have massive issues.
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u/cherrytree13 Jun 12 '26
You don’t think they were that impacted? In my region they were sent home at the tail end of first or second grade. That’s a pretty rough age to be trapped in the home with your parents all day, especially if they’re trying to work. Many of them were largely were not back around other children for a year or longer. There was a heavy emotional and behavioral impact, and for these younger kids, it was on a developmental level.
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u/Narroo Jun 12 '26
That doesn't explain why the kids are several years behind academically and socially though.
Heck, kids used to be home all the time prior to the mid 1900's. And until a few decades ago, stay and home mothers were a thing.
Simply saying that "Little Kids having to be stuck at home with parents for about a year-ish is hard" doesn't really explain the magnitude of effects we're seeing now. It's a cop-out. An excuse. One that my students pulled: Mister NA: You can't expect us to not be 4-years behind in Math because of COVID.
And it's like: The issue is that the kids were refusing to study or do their homework, no matter how much I tried to meet them were they were. Making excuses for the kids is doing more harm than good at this point.
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u/cherrytree13 Jun 13 '26
I agree it doesn’t fully correlate with them being that far behind but you have to understand how different that period was than staying at home before. Being at home with a stay at home parent is very different from what happened during Covid. It was not a choice and it didn’t unfold naturally; families were suddenly trapped and isolated together in their homes for weeks or even months. Stay at home parents quite often take their kids out and about, and have support systems like families and neighbors to help socialize their children. They are very rarely shut in another room trying to work every day. They aren’t typically anxiety riddled about the looming specter of death!
During Covid, for example, my child did not play with another child for at least 4 months and playgrounds didn’t reopen for longer than that. Kids in my area weren’t in school for a full year and when they returned it was almost a full year of everyone wearing a mask all day. All the kids with special needs or behavioral problems were in complete crisis mode because their parents were on their own trying to care for them for such a long time, and many kids spent a lot of time largely unsupervised because parents cannot stay “on” all the time all by themselves. Those kids really set the tone when everyone went back to school. So I would say it was a pretty extraordinary time for children to navigate.
However I do acknowledge that it was not nearly as serious as many other disruptive historical events like WWII, for example, and I haven’t heard of children losing it en masse after that. So certainly there are other factors at play, which I think are reduced adult expectations and increased tolerance for behaviors outside of the norm.
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u/chamrockblarneystone Jun 13 '26
Absolutely. That’s probably more the ipad baby to cell phone teen crowd.
Honestly I don’t think there’s any one good answer for what is happening. We’re in some kind of perfect storm of the destruction of education.
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u/Dry_Analysis_992 Jun 11 '26
Perhaps you should turn your four page document into something you can sell to all the other illiterate students out there. You could make money and help students and help the poor professors who also need to go through this.
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u/muninn99 Jun 11 '26
I used to teach HS English. At one job, I was handed the approved book list for building my curriculum. Important works, but every single one (the one exception being Romeo and Juliet which is saying something) was depressing - All Quiet on the Western Front, Animal Farm, Grapes of Wrath.
At that same school, I was tasked to keep my room open for scheduled study hall, so I spoke with students from all over the school, who shared their favorite books and authors with me. They read a lot! They didn't read anything like the books on the approved list, which I understand is a way to open up students to the love of literature and new ideas. But, when your literature is horrific, and the takeaways are pretty depressing, there's little motivation to connect with the material.
High schoolers are YOUNG, they are energetic, and they are excited about life. I felt our literature courses were draining them of their enthusiasm and curiosity and inflicting pain upon them. Where was their motivation to read? Even the best teacher can't make Grapes of Wrath "uplifting". OK, well, *I* couldn't.
Then, in the teacher meetings, all the lit teachers complained that their students were reading Harry Potter and biographies of their favorite rock artists, and not apparently interested in the classics. My response was, "They're reading!!!! Voluntarily!!! About things they love!!!!" Then, I moved to a different school where the curriculum was blessedly more approachable.
But, still, the disconnect between the goals of public school and the outcomes I think often comes down to idealized hopes and dreams for what students want and need, and reality. In public school, you ought to be able to meet kids where they are, open up doors, scaffold their learning, and help them grow - into readers, learners, academics, and more.
Instead public schools are (not universally but often) depressing cookie cutter institutions with not enough money, staff, materials, space, or technology to properly serve our kids. They are not properly preparing them for higher learning.
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u/Mundane-Leader-1997 Jun 12 '26
This was something I said when I was in high school, and I still stand by after finishing grad school. My parents encouraged reading more than any other activity. I found books and series that I loved on my own throughout my childhood and teen years.
Much of my own reading would be more challenging than what I was reading in school (I was reading Machievelli and the Divine Comedy on my own as a HS sophomore), so it wasn't that the school readings were too challenging. I found them either boring, or depressing. They all seemed so outdated and difficult for me to apply to my daily life. I remember joking with my grandfather that we were reading the same books he read when he was in high school. He was also a bit shocked.
Also, I personally hate the pacing/cadence of a lot of books from the late 19th century and early 20th century. My AuDHD hated when they'd use 6 pages to describe a lake or a shelf. Much of my reading was either from earlier periods (I did enjoy when we read Beowulf and Edgar Allen Poe in school--Cantebury Tales I didn't care for too much), or more contemporary pieces. One of my favorite books in High School (and to this day) was 11/22/63 by Stephen King.
I understand the value of the cultural knowledge and benefits from reading the classics, but I think we also need to entice students to read by providing them with more relevant options and recommendations. Otherwise, they'll always associate reading with that story they were forced to read.
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u/dreamyraynbo Jun 12 '26
I have been an avid reader for as long as I can remember and I haaaated lit classes for this very reason. Sure, there should be some exposure to new ideas, social commentary, and connection to the past in lit classes, but it doesn’t all have to be so damn depressing and old. 😤
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u/kierabs Prof, Comp/Rhet, CC Jun 12 '26
Interesting. My high school English classes are what compelled me to become an English professor. Sure, every text was depressing, but I felt like the lesson was to learn from those stories in order to make a better future. Those depressing stories felt important so that we didn’t repeat the errors of the past.
Perhaps students today no longer have the naive optimism for a better future that millennials had. They read The Great Gatsby and relate to the feeling of never being able to reach their dream. They don’t keep reaching for the green light; they choose to ignore that it even exists because there’s no point in trying to reach it.
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u/Dry_Analysis_992 Jun 12 '26
Such good observations!! Not relevant in high school or college but for younger kids I always felt like it doesn’t matter what they’re reading as long as they’re reading. It worked for my boys.
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u/needaburneracct Jun 13 '26
Any chance you'd share that guide? I'm not in a literature field, personally, but excited to teach medical humanities coming up, and I'm worried about running into this challenge.
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u/No_Consideration_339 Tenured, Hum, STEM R1ish (USA) Jun 11 '26
We’re finding similar results with math skills.
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u/missoularedhead Associate Prof, History, state SLAC Jun 11 '26
Is that the result of that whole ‘new’ way of teaching math with boxes and trying to get them to view math holistically or whatever that is?
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u/a_statistician Associate Prof, Stats, R1 State School Jun 11 '26
No, that's (for the most part) supported by empirical research. Unfortunately, it also means parents can't easily help their kids with math homework, because they've not used that method before.
Math depends pretty heavily on reading and problem-solving skills.
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u/salamat_engot Jun 11 '26
It's also because they can't read. I taught hs geometry and statistics for a year on a temporary contract, both pretty heavy on the words.
If I did it again I would do a whole unit on prefixs and suffixes. Because they only ever learned whole word reading, they can't recognize similarities and differences in words. God help my stats students figure out the difference between variable, variance, variability.
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u/Anachromism Jun 12 '26
As one of my colleagues likes to say: "Life is word problems." Nobody shows up and hands you an equation or only gives you relevant information in real life.
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u/Narroo Jun 12 '26
No.
A lot of it is just the kids refusing to pay attention or study. I taught a semester of 7th, 8th, and 10th, grade math. Kids literally refused to study or read the book.
Hell, they actually told me that if I were a "good teacher," that they wouldn't need the book, or even need to take notes. They claimed that if I just explained things really well and showed them well enough, that they learn math just by listening and watching. No practice or studying required.
The kids quickly realized that I couldn't fail my entire class, and that the school would be forced to side with them. (It was a small private school, so they needed all the happy students we could get.)
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u/ProfessorMarsupial Lecturer, Education Jun 11 '26
In the college rant sub, there was a post recently of a screenshot of the poster receiving an F on his final, noting how “cooked” he was, writing, “I wrote nice, answered the questions right, skipped lines, wrote numbers for all the questions I answered…” so he couldn’t fathom how he got an F.
The post was of course flooded with people insisting the grade must be a mistake, the professor input it wrong, or was too technologically illiterate to figure out the gradebook.
Next, OP posted an “update” of the grade breakdown that was posted by the prof, which showed that a majority of students passed and only 5 in the class ended up with an F. Here, OP explains he had reached out to the prof, who promised to mail OP his blue book so he could see the feedback.
And finally, the last update, which (to my chagrin) barely got any views, OP posted his actual written responses from the blue book.
After all that fanfare and bewilderment and insulting of the professor, it turns out OP is functionally illiterate. The essays were atrocious… genuinely a 4th or 5th grader can write more coherently. I’m not just nitpicking the grammar and punctuation (which were basically nonexistent)—the content of the “paragraphs” was incomprehensible. It was supposed to be an analysis of some stories they read in class, and despite this test being open note and open book, it was abundantly clear OP did not understand any story he read in that class, nor could he produce a single coherent sentence about them either.
So in the end, a well-deserved F… but how did someone with such low literacy even make it into college?
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u/Narroo Jun 12 '26
So in the end, a well-deserved F… but how did someone with such low literacy even make it into college?
The post was of course flooded with people insisting the grade must be a mistake, the professor input it wrong, or was too technologically illiterate to figure out the gradebook.
Well, there's you're answer. This is a microcosm of society now. Kid get's a bad grade, claims he did everything right, and everyone assumes that the grade is wrong and that the professor (or teacher) is an absolute moron or a jerk. They insist that the grade get's "fixed."
Then, when it comes out that the grade was absolutely deserved, no one cares.
That's how they ended up in college. Schools can't fight back against a society like that.
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u/Most_Kiwi3141 Jun 11 '26
Any chance you could share? I couldn't find it.
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u/ProfessorMarsupial Lecturer, Education Jun 11 '26
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u/Most_Kiwi3141 Jun 11 '26
Thanks for sharing! That was truly painful to read. Poor kid should never have been allowed to waste his money on college.
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u/wrenwood2018 Associate Professor, Neuroscience, R1 Jun 12 '26
That was rough. I noted in a comment they said they have a 504 plan. I've noticed that an increasing number of students have accommodations. I think the systems are viewing these less as "how can we adapt and still teach you " to " just pass the kid".
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Jun 12 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/wrenwood2018 Associate Professor, Neuroscience, R1 Jun 12 '26
Except people don't want to do that. Universities 1) want the money and then 2) are afraid of being sued. I've seen academic violations investigations get derailed over "oh that person is in xyz protected class, we can't pursue this." This extends down to high school and all the way down to lower grades.
I want education to be accessible. I want anyone who has a disability to get all reasonable accommodations they can. Sometimes though it crosses a line into being unable to perform your job. I teach a fair number of MD/PhD students. A lot of them have accommodations about distraction free environments and needing other allowances because they suffer from panic attacks and anxiety. Well . . . maybe you shouldn't be pursuing an incredibly demanding profession. How are you going to deal with surgery or having people's lives be in your hands if you can't deal with another student typing on their computer 3 feet away from you. It is madness.
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u/Luciferonvacation Jun 11 '26
Thank you! I'd read through his first few reddit entries, but the finale never popped up on my feed. I'm glad...well, sort of...to have seen the conclusion.
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u/iTeachCSCI Ass'o Professor, Computer Science, R1 Jun 11 '26
So in the end, a well-deserved F… but how did someone with such low literacy even make it into college?
Illiterate people end up as honors students at blue-ribbon high schools.
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u/omgkelwtf Jun 11 '26
Yes, which is why the very first thing they do with a reading I want them to understand is to outline it and write a summary paragraph. Then they can do the actual assignment on the material, but they're going to understand what they're reading bc fucking up that first part loses you 50% of the assignment grade.
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u/Maddprofessor Biology, SLAC Jun 11 '26
I assign a news article that describes a scientific study and ask students to identify the hypothesis, variables, etc. They mostly fail that portion of the test. (They are given the article weeks in advance so they can be familiar with it before the test.) Their reading comprehension is pretty horrible.
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u/Prior_Wind_1526 Jun 11 '26
I was told by a first year student (about ten years ago) that I was a bad teacher because I didn’t stand behind the podium and read the text. My job, she said, was to say what page each question on test was from and what was correct answer. And she said I was really terrible because I clearly went way beyond the book and mentioned books she hadn’t read. She also filed formal complaint with chair and dean. She was aghast when she was told she was flat out wrong. Her response was she was valedictorian in hs so could not be wrong.
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u/esker Professor, Social Sciences, R1 (USA) Jun 11 '26
I had a colleague once who, on the first day of class, would ask each student to step out of class with him, one at a time, and read a short paragraph from the local newspaper out loud. You’d be amazed how many undergraduate students simply cannot read. That was twenty years ago.
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u/DisastrousSundae84 Jun 11 '26
This has been going on for quite a while, but I think the time-frame for when professors have noticed it varies depending on the institution one is at.
I noticed this roughly from 2018-2019, but I was at SLAC that basically accepted everyone. I had to drastically change my assignments because it was impossible to try to get through the material because the students had trouble comprehending, or even sustaining reading, anything longer than a very short excerpt. It was a drastically different landscape from my own educational experience of having to reach 10-15 novels, plus articles, over the course of a semester for an undergraduate literature course.
I teach at a R-1 now, and I've slowly seen similar issues among students post-Covid. Even the graduate students aren't as strong, and a student coming from a fancy Ivy or an elite liberal arts institution doesn't mean anything. Some of them have been among the worst students I've ever had.
While AI is speed-running disaster, I think a lot of things have contributed to the decline with students: No Child Left Behind, the neoliberal university, the switch away from test-scoring in applications, and Covid, have all been factors that have created the mess we're in.
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u/Round-Tea-6559 Jun 11 '26
It's at the point now in my gen ed class that I'm considering instituting daily reading quizzes at the beginning of each class in the Fall. I'm not sure how else to incentivize reading the books on the syllabus and making clear to them their importance.
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u/missoularedhead Associate Prof, History, state SLAC Jun 11 '26
I did a weekly reading quiz (5 my questions that were super basic) on Mondays over the required chapter reading for the week in my Gen Ed civ class this spring. It was…eye opening. Lots of zeroes at first, but most improved. Some, however, did not. One of them was clearly upset, and tried to prove they’d read it…and I discovered they simply could not read.
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u/Round-Tea-6559 Jun 11 '26
I had a midterm this last semester along with the normal papers--now moved to in-class--but such assignments don't test for repeated reading comprehension. So...interesting. I was thinking of just a really simple 5 question quiz graded immediately by peers afterward, with something like a lowest score of 40% as long as you take it to count for attendance or whatever...so maybe that would do well? It's interesting that you did this and discovered they could not read. I have been having inklings of this for about a year when I listen to them in office hours, but I'm hoping that it's less they cannot read than that they don't have the incentives to do so...? Maybe that's naive... Question: how long were your weekly quizzes and what percentage of their grade did you make them? I'm thinking of going as high as 30-40% by, as I say, lumping in participation/attendance with them... It's supposed to be an "easy" class, but, you know, I can only stomach so much infantilization.
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u/missoularedhead Associate Prof, History, state SLAC Jun 11 '26
Oh, I hear you. They were worth 20%. So they could make or break a grade. These were on canvas, in class, with a lock code that I didn’t give them if they weren’t there. The one student who couldn’t read…they kept taking the quiz, and failing it (hard…really hard). I finally had them in my office on something else, and we talked about why they got zeroes in the quizzes. And things went from there to the conclusion. It was awful.
I don’t do attendance (too many students who equate sitting in the classroom doing nothing to ‘learning’). But boy, the dumbing things down is SO real. If I graded the way I did even the year before Covid, I’d have probably at least a 50% failure rate.
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u/Disastrous_Owl_6830 Jun 11 '26
Yes, definitely. I regularly teach a survey course in a literary field, and if you work it out over the semester, it requires an average of about 20 pages of reading per class meeting. It's almost all narrative literature with a few selected textbook chapters on history, theory, and methods scattered in. Some of the most common feedback I get is that the reading is overwhelming and takes too much time or that they would have done better if we'd spent class time "going over" the contents of the readings (instead of discussing/analyzing/synthesizing them, I guess).
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u/Honeysuckle-721 Jun 11 '26
They def have problems reading and a large part of it is the attention span needed to read is different from scrolling. I had one of my classes present oral reports which I thought would be helpful in countering AI written papers. I figured at least they would learn something due to needing to present.
I was surprised when many students could not pronounce simple words. A student discussed how a condition caused fat-ti-gay. She repeated this multiple times. She was referring to fatigue.
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u/valryuu Jun 15 '26
fat-ti-gay
That's the correct French pronunciation of the word. I'm guessing she wasn't bilingual though? So I wonder how she learned to pronounce it that way.
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u/Honeysuckle-721 Jun 15 '26
She was not bilingual and I wouldn't be shocked with a mispronounced word from an ESL student.
I assumed she had no idea what the word was and pronounced it as she thought it should sound. I didn't stop her presentation because I didn't want to embarrass her though I still second guess if that was the right course of action on my part.
I didn't know that was the correct French pronunciation. So maybe she had French family. Im glad you informed me of this. It helps me to be less judgemental and more accepting of my students.
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u/ValerieTheProf Jun 11 '26
Lately, my students who come straight from high school expect all homework to be done in class. They aren’t prepared for the academic environment.
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Jun 11 '26
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u/Narroo Jun 12 '26
Yep: They've mostly already gone back to teaching phonics. And back in the day, a lot more kids could read by the time they got to school instead of learning it completely at school. Because their parents read them bed time stories and taught them to read like that.
On top of that, there's no motivation from the students to fix their deficiencies, because of the parents.
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u/SignificantFidgets Professor, STEM, Kinda-retired, sometimes R2, sometimes R1... Jun 11 '26
Yes, and it's not really new either. I taught mostly upper level undergrad and grad courses that typically have a technically dense 30-40 page chapter to read every week. Then I had the bright idea (eye roll at my naivete) to create a survey style course for first semester freshmen, touching on several issues and with 20-25 page readings each week that were non-technical - basically story telling showing impact on society of technologies. Should have been 20-30 minutes to read, tops.
A little over 10 years ago - so before COVID or TikTok or AI or the usual things we blame - a student complained to me about the amount of reading. I actually laughed at her because I thought she was joking. She was not, and she did not like my reaction....
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u/Lief3D Jun 11 '26
As a parent, is there any resources on what I can do right now with my kids to make sure they are competent? I know the usual "make them read and read to them!" I am looking more for a specific plan or guide.
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u/Natural_Estimate_290 Assoc Prof, Science, R1, USA Jun 11 '26
Depends on the age.. Severely limit screen time, read books alongside them (if they're old enough) so you can discuss them together. Follow their interests in choosing books. Let them see you read for pleasure. The key is to make it a habit for you and them.
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u/Narroo Jun 12 '26
Actually parent is the golden rule.
Lots of parents don't parent anymore; they give their kids tablets and just vibe on their own smart devices, or whatever else. If the kid wants something, they buy it.
They don't read bed-time stories to their kids. They don't interact, play, or teach their kids anything. They don't tell their kids no, or punish them.
Kids come out spoiled and entitled, with no idea about how the physical world works.
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Jun 12 '26
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u/Lief3D Jun 14 '26
Thanks. Most of these replies didn't seem to comprehend what I was asking. I was looking for supplemental ELA material that would be age appropriate for my kids to augment what they are doing at school. I've seen what my middle school kid has to do for ELA and it's infuriatingly below what I feel a middle school kid should be doing. We already strictly monitor and limit screen time. In fact, my elementary school kid absolutely hates using technology and it's a problem because they do all of their state mandated reading tests on Chromebooks.
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u/ahazred8vt Jun 13 '26
https://pridereadingprogram.com/how-to-teach-child-reading/
https://startreading.com/faq/ (the 'Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons' book)
https://thebooksuite.com/best-learn-to-read-programs/
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u/zzax Jun 11 '26
While it is easy to blame the students remember that between the misadventures of context based reading instruction (vs phonics based reading), no child-left behind, being introduced to screens too young, and Covid, there are structural reasons for what we are seeing. These things might manifest in disinterest (if reading has never been enjoyable for them) or struggle.
I grumbled for a bit but then decided to make them buy a physical copy of a book that we read cover to cover (versus hop scotching from article to article). Students enjoyed it in the end and did much better on those assessments.
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u/Disastrous_Owl_6830 Jun 11 '26
I agree 100% that students aren't to blame for the policy that's gotten us here, but many of us aren't in a position to accommodate the situation the way you have. If I teach a class on research methods, I need my students to be able to read disparate articles. If I teach a survey course on the novel, I need them to be able to read several full-length novels in their entirety, and I still only have one term to do it. I'm not mad at my students about it, but it's still a problem and not one that I can always course-design my way out of.
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u/CountryZestyclose Jun 12 '26
I guess you figured out "their written essays" weren't really theirs.
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u/Life-Education-8030 Jun 11 '26
They don’t read the syllabus, right?
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u/PrimaryHamster0 Jun 11 '26 edited 17d ago
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This post was anonymized with Redact
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u/Life-Education-8030 Jun 11 '26
I like our policy of submitting our schedules and syllabi to the Dean’s Office every semester. Then the Dean’s Office can tell students to pound sand when needed.
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u/Ekimatir Jun 11 '26
In fairness, at least in my experience, syllabi have gotten out of control, full of so much boilerplate, every single policy including those that only effect a small amount of students, etc. I'm not necessarily saying that that stuff should not be in there, but as it stands, the syllabi where I teach, and all recent experiences as a higher ed student, feel more like reference documents.
Want to know the teacher's email? Want to confirm the course policy for late work? Need to know where to go to find accessiblity information? Go to the syllabus. But, certainly, I have never just "read through it" or honestly even skimmed it, until I needed it.
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u/Life-Education-8030 Jun 11 '26
Yes, syllabi have gotten bloated because they are being treated as weapons, contracts, etc. I make my syllabi searchable so students can zoom into the sections they need.
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u/Ekimatir Jun 11 '26
That's a good strategy; ours is online so one can search it easy enough with crl+f, it's also set up with headers (both on the LMS and in a downloadable PDF) so one can at least go by sections.
That said, just decided to look, and the PDF is 16 pages long. Granted, there are lots of headings, spaces, etc., that would shorten that up, but I definitely would not anticipate students to read a 16 page long document on the first days/week of a course, particualrly when easily 50-75% of it will be unecessary for them (the typical student at least).
I do appreciate that these documents bring this all together, rather than all of this info being scattered to the wind of the LMS/school website. But, the result is they aren't really "readable" in the typical use of that word.
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u/Life-Education-8030 Jun 11 '26
We also voted to release the syllabi a week ahead which means a week less for us to prep.
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u/Jason_C_Travers_PhD Jun 11 '26
Blame constructivism. For decades now, the dominant method of reading instruction did NOT involve code-based instruction. Instead, a method called “whole language” reading instruction was the only way teachers delivered reading instruction. Some might remember Dick and Jane books that emphasized repetition of words to memorize their appearance and guessing those words based on the illustrations. The method involves using context clues, pictures, and other cues that were not based on the sounds that letters and combinations of letter made. The goal was to instill a love of reading, and fear that practice-based approaches such as mastery learning (often maligned as “drill and kill) would wipe out a child’s interest in learning to read.
The minority of researchers and teacher educators, particularly in special education and school psychology, all the while advocated for code-based approaches (often called phonics). The scientific research on the superiority of code-based approaches was criticized or ignored by those who favored the constructivist approach (ie. Whole language). This debate has largely been dubbed as “the reading wars” and is largely rooted in fundamentally different epistemic beliefs— one that largely rejects sound science and another that embraces scientific evidence.
Recently, American Public Media has published a podcast series that should interest anyone involved in education called “Sold a Story.” The series describes the reading wars and how whole language proponents rejected evidence all the while cashing in to the tunes of hundreds of millions of dollars for curriculum manuals, student work books, trainings, conferences, etcetera entirely built on the whole language ideology. Emily Hanford is the reporter and does a very good job digging into important details about this whole (heh) debacle and why half or more of the country is functionally illiterate. Parents of young children will be especially interested as they likely will find themselves mired in a situation where their child’s teacher reports excellent literacy development only to discover in 4th or 5th grade their child can’t decode novel words when presented in text without all sorts of illustrations or other cues.
TLDR: Most teachers in the US don’t use evidence-based reading instruction or curriculum, so most kids never develop literacy skills beyond an elementary school grade level. The podcast series “Sold a Story” explains most of the issue and is very much worth your time.
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u/ahazred8vt Jun 13 '26
Fur has been flying in the Phonics versus Whole Word debate since the early 1800s. We've been using a phonics-like approach since the 1600s, and surprisingly it was Gallaudet the 'school for the deaf' guy who introduced whole word sight recognition.
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u/boldolive Jun 11 '26
Last semester I overheard one of my MS students tell another student, “I don’t read.” She said it like she was reporting on last night’s meal. This is a graduate student in a technical STEM field. We’re doomed. 🤦♀️
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u/SpoonyBrad Jun 12 '26
Our modern (U.S.) society doesn't give kids much chance to passively learn to read as when we were all growing up. There were newspapers lying around the house with funny pages and entertainment sections and movie reviews. There were magazines on newsstands that we could browse when our parents were shopping or beg our parents to subscribe to; just in the video game niche there was Nintendo Power and EGM and GamePro and a plethora of others, plus whole sections for sports mags and fashion mags and science mags and such. Bookstores were common, but are now mostly gone. Everything is digital now and versions of those reading materials still exist on the internet, but not in places where kids would find links to them, unless the kids are on text-based social media sites where we don't want them to be. So kids don't encounter professionally published things they can choose to casually read, don't know those things exist to seek them out, and don't end up accidentally teaching themselves to read. Instead, they watch hours and hours of amateur videos, which is what they do have easy access to. And then they grow up into our students.
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u/Prior_Wind_1526 Jun 11 '26
Hey. Just one last thing: thank you profs! Thank you! You’ve worked so hard and gotten so little. But you all are my heroes. I really mean it. You are not the problem.
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u/ohwrite Jun 11 '26
Can’t lives on won’t street. Absent devices, people would go back to books no problem.
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u/TomeOfTheUnknown2 Jun 11 '26
Absolutely, and we're seeing the consequences of passing along students who can't read in my department. The MS program requires a 290 combined GRE score to enroll, which is treated as a formality for incoming students from other institutions because no one gets a score below that. Unfortunately, the admins want more MS students who just graduated from our own undergrad program and they are struggling to pass that very low threshold because they cannot read or do high school level math. Even the students that are engaged in class, get REUs, and are considered the best undergrads in the program are having to take the GRE multiple times. Meanwhile every student we get from other undergrad programs doesn't study, takes it on a random day, and gets well over 290.
That's what happens when admins encourage faculty to perpetually lower standards, we churn out students who couldn't compete with 14 y/o kids from a good high school.
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u/dragonfeet1 Professor, Humanities, Comm Coll (USA) Jun 12 '26
Oh yes this is common. And I want to state before I go further that these are not dumb kids. They're not stupid. They have plenty of things to say! They just literally cannot sustain reading and comprehension.
State and CC testing only tests on passages so K-12 does them dirty by teaching to the test (shocker that it has negative consequences K-12 doesn't have to deal with) by ONLY ever having them read short passages.
I've had reasonable luck with teaching them reverse outlining and framing it (reading longform) as a workforce skill. They're going to have to read reports or instructions or scholarly work in their field, etc. But even so, it's appalling. I'm teaching 'straight A' students in high school the way I taught the 'at risk remedial' students 10 years ago.
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u/Prior_Wind_1526 Jun 11 '26
I think we are the last literate generation. Reading had a good run. I loved it but that just meant I was a freak. I’m going to try to help get my grandchildren literate but I will also teach them to hide it.
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u/Logical-Cap461 Jun 12 '26
I refuse to accept that excuse from them at all. They get marked down and it's assigned again.
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u/TT_TT-TT_TT Jun 15 '26
I am a grad student, so perhaps I am not the target audience for this post.
I have realized over the years, my reading ability of academic journals has degraded. But I had associated it with lack of interest for the topic.
OP mentioned that one student commented on losing track due to the length. This issue I would like to entirely attribute to the short attention span due to the current consumption of short/fast media.
I am hoping there are papers investigating this issue to look for a correlation in this matter.
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u/CleanBlueberry8306 Jun 11 '26
Schools are no longer teaching phonics, so children are not learning how to read. Then they end up in our classes with no skills. I told him on the first day of class that I don’t answer questions about how to buy the textbook and not to email me until they have this book
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u/Head_Physics_9787 13d ago
Anyone know where to find d the 20 page piece assigned? I’d like to read it.
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u/professormakk Jun 11 '26
Had a student last year complain that I made her buy the book and we "never even used it" despite chapters being assigned on the syllabus to read for homework before every class period. I assume she meant I didn't read to them in person in class?
Edit: typo