Is This the End of Reading?: Students are coming to college less able and less willing to read. Professors are stymied.

Students are coming to college less able and less willing to read. Professors are stymied.

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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.

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,...