College Students Not Reading Is an Issue, So Teachers Are Adjusting How Classes Look
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When Alden Jones taught her first back-in-person college class during the pandemic, something surprising happened. “Here I am, teaching the same class I’ve taught for 10 years, using the same book and asking the same questions, and my students were dead-silent," says Jones, who teaches literature and creative writing at Emerson College, a private liberal arts school in Boston. "Then I would ask easier questions — silent. So I was like, Okay, I know it’s not me and I know it’s not the book, so it must be you. Like, what is going on here?”
The possible reasons were complicated, she recalls for Teen Vogue. In part, likely “shell-shock” from COVID; in part, as one student told her, an increased fear of judgment by peers or getting something wrong. Or, Jones adds, perhaps “this mentality of ‘Why should I think it through when I could get the answer on my phone?’”
But another large question looms over this story and much of the thinking Jones has been doing in the last few years regarding teaching: Are college students struggling with reading more than they did previously? And, if so, what should educators be doing to help them?
In recent years, Jones has increasingly adjusted her teaching style and syllabi to accommodate what she sees as a decline in students’ reading ability. Her approach involves a “constant dialogue” with her classes, she says. This approach comes with some sacrifices, but as Jones sees it, those are ultimately overshadowed by benefits. “I’d much rather discuss a short story by Julio Cortázar that is extremely dense but only 10 pages long and know that everyone has read the entire 10 pages so that we can talk about the whole work," she explains. "I’d rather do that than teach a 300-page Cortázar novel that maybe one or two students will read entirely.”
Jones is far from alone. While some educators who speak with Teen Vogue say they have not seen a difference in students’ willingness to read, several professors across higher education institutions disagree, echoing worries their peers have expressed online about drops in reading stamina and efficacy among today’s undergraduates. Adam Kotsko, a faculty member of the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, a private institution in Naperville, Illinois, wrote about the issue for Slate. He tells Teen Vogue that for years he assigned around 25 to 35 pages of reading per session in entry-level classes, but “now it seems like if I write down on my syllabus a 20-page reading, I start to get tense.”
As students return to campus this fall, some humanities professors are wondering whether their students’ learning needs will differ from their counterparts of 20, 10, or even five years ago. As a result they are taking a harder look at some of their instructional practices.
One likely reason behind this recent trend is hardly a secret: As some states rush to ban phone use in schools, more than 70% of high school teachers call cellphones distracting students a “major problem” in classrooms, according to a Pew Research Center survey. John Edwin Mason, a history professor at the University of Virginia who has been teaching in the US since 1990, tells Teen Vogue that his impression is “students are less eager to read, and they’re certainly less eager to read academic writing.” Digital technology and social media have taken a toll on attention spans, he says, adding, “I feel it myself.”
Or as Jeff Dolven, an English professor at Princeton University, puts it: “All of us, the faculty, have noticed that students’ attention spans have diminished. We’ve probably noticed that our own attention spans are under assault and diminishing. And clearly the reason for that is the kind of rapid consumption of media that’s encouraged by having a phone in your pocket.”
Casey Boyle, an associate professor of rhetoric and writing at the University of Texas at Austin, says it's hardly surprising that his colleagues are noticing a drop among today’s students in the reading practices he and his peers grew up with. “What is surprising," he notes, "to be honest with you, is… how few of my colleagues recognize that it’s not really the students’ fault, right? They’re interacting in media ecologies that we never did when we were growing up.”
To some instructors the notion of trimming syllabi or increasingly excerpting assigned reading feels like an insult to the intelligence of students — not to mention their tuition money. Jennifer Frey, a philosophy professor and the dean of the Honors College at the University of Tulsa, says she sees such moves by colleagues as a “tyranny of low expectations.” “It is actually incredibly important that students just read a massive amount,” she tells Teen Vogue. “Reading widely and deeply is incredibly important… in terms of building the skills that are necessary, no matter what you’re going to go on to do.”
At the same time, other educators point to the challenges many students face and urge colleagues to exhibit empathy in constructing their expectations. Antonio Byrd, who teaches writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, says that his experience teaching many first-generation college students and those juggling jobs and other personal responsibilities has shown him the importance of accommodating the reality of student lives outside the classroom. “I think it comes down to… priorities,” he says. “By giving them, say, one reading or two readings, they can be a little more deeply engaged with that reading for that week.”
It remains to be seen whether there will be a widespread shift toward educators cutting down on assigned reading. In a range of syllabi from 2009 to this year, shared with Teen Vogue by the English departments at Texas A&M University and the University of Central Florida, the volume of reading asked of students has remained largely comparable. Anecdotally, though, some professors say they are reworking the length of the texts they assign. Jones includes fewer books but more short stories for the same course than she did a decade prior. Dolven and Kotsko both mention being more selective and intentional about what they include on their reading lists.
Whether or not professors choose to change the syllabi themselves, they are facing a host of decisions in building out workable strategies to support their classes in reaching the reading goals they set for them. Says Boyle, “If you want students to be able to read a novel a week, then you’re going to give them some kind of structure to be able to do so."
What that “structure” looks like means many different things for different people. Byrd says that since 2020, right before the pandemic began, he has been putting students into “reading teams,” with each student choosing a couple of the assigned readings for the week and providing their teammates with summaries. He also uses digital annotation tools that enable students to comment online about the reading as they make their way through it and engage with comments from classmates. Kotsko asks students to take photos of their text annotations and submit those as assignments, an approach he says has been working quite well. Boyle encourages his classes to adopt an “overview procedure” for reading, understanding how the text is organized and skimming the text’s introduction and conclusion before diving into the core of it.
Says Mason, he has started making requirements for written assignments “much more directive,” designing questions to check whether the students made it through the entire text. (“My assignments used to be much more open-ended,” he notes.) Now he’s thinking of leveling up from that: “I’m very, very much considering going back to quizzes, even though I resented them as a student.”
Reading-check quizzes have worked well in her classes, Jones says, especially as students who do the reading feel grateful for the weekly chance at an easy A.
One question Mason finds himself asking again and again of students struggling with assigned reading: “Do you turn off your phone?” They usually respond with shock — and Mason empathizes. After all, “previous generations didn’t have phones to turn off.”
Dolven talks about the culture of attention and mindfulness that he wants to cultivate in his classes. To him, that doesn’t mean being unreasonable by expecting students to commit to reading for four-hours straight without once looking up; however, putting the phone in another room or even leaving it at home when they go to the library can be a reasonable expectation — and perhaps become a cultural norm to which students can hold one another. “I don’t mean to do that as a complete ‘You should change your life,’” he adds, “but I do want students to have a feeling for what that can be like.”
Dolven also serves on the faculty of the Strother School of Radical Attention, a nonprofit educational group dedicated to cultivating attention, and finds value in working on these skills with and around others. “It makes it quite a bit easier to pay attention, I think, if you’re doing it with a community,” he says.
Similarly, Frey feels that the core ingredient in fostering a commitment to reading in her classes is creating a culture around the practice. That starts with professors actively helping students “understand what’s at stake,” she says. “The biggest problem that students have is a problem of imagination. They’re just not sure how they can do this. You have to help them imagine themselves getting it done.”
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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