--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noelle King: And I'm Noelle King. Today, we're talking about the decline of deep reading.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's right. College students in 2024 are less willing and able to read full books. And we're asking, does that matter?
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. But you know where else social annotation is huge? On college campuses.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [chuckles] That's right. We use social annotation to edit every episode of Today Explained.
--:-- Noelle King: But you know where else social annotation is huge? On college campuses. Students are completing their reading assignments on social annotation apps where they can comment and ask questions in the digital margins of a reading assignment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And teachers can track how much time students spend when they give an article, essay, or journal. And our old friend AI will even grade students' reading for teachers.
--:-- Noelle King: And why would teachers need these kinds of tools? Because college kids just aren't that into reading anymore.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What on earth are we going to do about that? Ahead on the show today.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome back to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noelle King: And I'm Noelle King. We're talking about the decline of deep reading.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, let's talk to someone who's an expert on this. Beth McMurtry is a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, Beth, what's going on with reading? Why are we talking to you about reading?
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Well, there's a lot that's going on with reading. When it comes to reading, one of the things that I've been hearing a lot from a lot of different faculty members is that students simply aren't doing the reading.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's right. They're not doing the reading. And it's not just that they're not doing the reading, it's that they're not doing it well either.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Exactly. A lot of professors are finding that if they assign anything that's more than five or ten pages long, students tell them that they can't do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Why is that?
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Because they get distracted, that they get exhausted, that they get lost in the reading, and then they just give up.
--:-- Noelle King: Another element to this too, though, and one I think that is the most alarming to professors, is that students are coming to college lacking critical reading skills.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: They might be asked to summarize what they've read and they fundamentally change the meaning of it. They can't summarize it. They might be asked to compare and contrast two readings, and they simply can't do it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: It's a fascinating phenomenon that we're facing because, yes, we assume that by the time you get to college, you know how to read.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Obviously, people can still pick up a book or an article and get the gist of it. But what we're talking about now is like reading a dense or complicated or lengthy article or textbook or novel.
--:-- Noelle King: That's what seems to have been fading with this generation.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: And so I take it a class that might require students to read, what, four or five books? Is it functioning the way it used to when I was in college 15 years ago?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, I think you would, if you went into a college classroom today or you looked at a college syllabus, you would probably be surprised at how little reading is assigned.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: I mean, professors understand that they have to kind of meet students where they are. They understand that if students are not doing the reading, they have to change things up.
--:-- Noelle King: Otherwise, they will have a really bad class session, and they will have students who simply aren't doing the work.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So what I've been hearing from professors is, you know, maybe 15 years ago, they assigned five novels, and today they're assigning one.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Or they may be eliminating academic articles altogether, those really dense academic articles that we all struggled with, and students simply can't read them.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Reading research articles may be a different type of reading than you are used to.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: This tutorial will help you create a strategy for reading and understanding this type of information.
--:-- Noelle King: They're substituting in news articles or essays. More professors are introducing videos.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Hey, y'all. I'm Nick, and this is my video blog and podcast.
--:-- Noelle King: And other sort of original content as a way to kind of get students engaged in the course without saying, I need you to read a book a week to get through this class.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: How did we get here? This didn't happen overnight, did it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, it didn't. Because what we're talking about here are kind of structural or systemic societal and educational challenges.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: So let's start with the one that everybody knows about, which is the introduction of smartphones and the rise of social media.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That has affected all of us. We are losing our ability to concentrate. We are getting distracted more easily.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: I remember talking to one professor, an English professor. He has always asked his students to tell him their reading story, their reading narrative.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: He wants to know what their experiences with reading have been.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: And he said it wasn't that long ago that they would talk about things like going to the library or seeing their parents reading the newspaper over breakfast or having their parents read to them at night.
--:-- Noelle King: Now they talk about things like reading on TikTok, reading on Instagram.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Reading what on TikTok?
--:-- Beth McMurtry: It's all video. Yeah. If you think about the words on the screen, fragmented, incomplete sentences.
--:-- Noelle King: Now, the pandemic did have a huge effect on students, unsurprisingly, as we all moved to Zoom and students went to Zoom school.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: I have to go to school now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [chuckles] Teachers were trying really hard to keep students engaged, keep students online even if their cameras were off.
--:-- Noelle King: Good morning, y'all. So as y'all know today is a virtual learning day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That means, Louis, that we can see you.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Having to teach in 2020 during the height of the pandemic led to a lot of traumatic experiences.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Teacher burnout was at an all-time high. A lot of students were depressed.
--:-- Noelle King: It was just a lot of bad things going on.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: I don't know about you, but the school year has been kind of tough for me and I've had to rethink a lot of things that I do traditionally.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So students were learning less and they were reading less.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: And at the same time, grading changed a little bit. There was more leniency around grading.
--:-- Noelle King: In some school districts, teachers might have been told, you know, gives everybody at least a 50 percent, even if they didn't do the work, or grade for attendance or grade for participation.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: And what that did is I think it gave students a false sense of what was required of them, something that they have since taken into college.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If we want to step even farther back, we need to talk about the testing culture in schools, because I think that has really fundamentally changed how we teach reading.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Many of us remember, if we're old enough, we remember reading multiple books over the school year, maybe even writing book reports or writing essays.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When you teach to the test, you're basically assigning short essays, you're assigning paragraphs, you're assigning excerpts from longer books.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: And then students are asked to say, discern the meaning in this paragraph or talk about the writing style or the use of metaphor.
--:-- Noelle King: And as one professor described it to me, it turns reading into a scavenger hunt.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right? So students were taught to read in this way, and they come into college reading this way.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: And then professors who, you know, maybe didn't fully understand what was happening in the K-12 system are saying, what is going on here? My students don't have critical reading skills.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you think of reading like exercise, they weren't exercising, right? They weren't engaging in the act of reading.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: You know, this might be an insensitive question, but do we have any data that suggests whether in addition to reading less, students are, I don't know, getting dumber?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think if you look at certain tests, there has been learning loss.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: If you look at maybe SAT and ACT trend lines, right, they've been going down a little bit.
--:-- Noelle King: Let's talk about those college admission test scores. They are dropping lower than they've ever been.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: More than 40 percent of seniors meet none of the college readiness benchmarks the fifth consecutive year.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Test scores have declined.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Now the question, what is to blame, the pandemic or something else?
--:-- Noelle King: If you talk to or survey superintendents and teachers, they might say a significant portion of their students are doing more poorly on math and on English.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: So there has definitely been documented learning loss in K-12 that I think has been tied to the pandemic.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So is that an argument professors can make here? If nothing else, if you want to be as smart as your, you know, predecessors in your position, do the reading?
--:-- Beth McMurtry: This generation is very self-critical. So telling students that they're dumb or dumber than previous generations, I think, just feeds this spiral of anxiety.
--:-- Noelle King: I don't think that's a way forward for anybody.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: Okay, sorry. I think we have to remember that the students didn't create this environment. We, the adults, created the environment and the system that they lived in, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, this is the result of our handiwork.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: So we kind of have to ask ourselves, if we're unhappy with the skills and abilities students are coming out of high school with and coming into college with, do we care enough to change that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do you think this trend can be turned around?
--:-- Beth McMurtry: When it comes to reading, I think it helps to take the long view.
--:-- Noelle King: I thought it was interesting when I was reporting the story that a couple of different people talked about the shift from the oral to the written culture like thousands of years ago.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: When writing was first introduced, people mourned the loss of the oral culture, the oral tradition.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And they just thought of writing as like a negative. Like nobody would say that today.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: But the point is that if we're shifting to an oral slash written culture again, if we're shifting to a multimedia culture, what does that mean?
--:-- Noelle King: What are we gaining? Even as we lose some of the deep reading that we have been used to doing.
--:-- Beth McMurtry: And the truth is we don't know yet because we're just at the beginning of the shift.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Beth McMurtry is a senior writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education. You can read her, if you're into that sort of thing, at chronicle.com.
--:-- Noelle King: When we return, we're going to talk about what's going on in your noggin when you're reading and why you might miss that sensation when it's gone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A little food for thought coming up on Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome back to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noelle King: And I'm Noelle King. We're talking about the decline of deep reading.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, let's talk to someone who's an expert on this. Mary Ann Wolf is a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, Mary Ann, what's going on with reading? Why are we talking to you about reading?
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Well, as a cognitive neuroscientist, I've been studying the brain's ability to read and understand complex texts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what have you found?
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: The reality is that no one on this earth was meant to read. The brain had to build up a new circuit.
--:-- Noelle King: And that new circuit connects all these amazing parts of the brain, cognition, language, perception, memory, but also feeling, affect.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: So we build this circuitry and then over time, we actually have the capacity to elaborate it. It becomes ever more sophisticated.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And when it becomes sophisticated, it begins to have a circuit I call the circuit for deep reading and figuring out how the new information meets or does not meet the information stored already.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Most important to me are the three big deep reading processes, empathy.
--:-- Noelle King: Sean, it takes time, but the brain connects the ability to leave, really leave the page and enter the lives and thoughts and feelings of others who are completely different.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Whether it's a completely different historical epoch or a different culture, religion, etc., you are entering that life. That's empathy.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Next and probably never more important than this moment is critical analysis.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: We have a frontal lobe dance in which we say, ah, this is what is meant. Oh, no, I refute this because it's not true.
--:-- Noelle King: So we have this evaluation process, but it takes time.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: And the end is a real sense, whether it's true, misinformation, or worst of all, especially these days, intentional disinformation.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, the third deep reading process is one that doesn't always happen.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: And that's this almost like sanctuary feeling of being so immersed that this is where the novelist Proust comes in in my work.
--:-- Noelle King: He said, the heart of reading is when we enter the wisdom of the author and go beyond it to discover our own wisdom, our own insights, our own best thoughts.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Most of the people who are not reading books aren't reading at that level.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: But from my perspective as an English literature major, they're not just skimming the information and getting just the gist.
--:-- Noelle King: They're skimming the opportunity to enter another life.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are we missing out when we read a dozen articles before we go to bed on our phone or first thing when we wake up?
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Are we missing out if we decide to listen to Moby Dick as an audiobook while we commute over the course of a month instead of sitting down and reading it every day when we get home from work?
--:-- Noelle King: So every single time I'm asked this question...
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Oh no, someone's asked you that before?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [laughs] Oh, pshaw.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: No, you ask it because, and I have answered it because it is on the top of everyone's mind.
--:-- Noelle King: I love audiobooks, and I especially like them for commuting, and I work with a lot of individuals with dyslexia.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: That's one of the best ways they can get information.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now, is it the same as reading at the immersive level?
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: For some, it is, but by and large, it does skip what is called comprehension monitoring.
--:-- Noelle King: That's when we're reading and we are actually checking ourselves, checking what we have missed, what we have skipped.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: And in the audio version, by and large, we don't go back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are many other differences, but I'll name one in particular that's important for development and for especially children and individuals over time, and that is the palpable kinesthetic nature of the book because it aids spatial memory.
--:-- Noelle King: So, Sean, here's a book. I could find, oh, it's left side, lower, about a third of the way through.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: I have a spatial memory that we aren't even aware of.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's all these extra, if you will, affordances when we have the physical printed book.
--:-- Noelle King: Are you worried? You've clearly pointed out that, you know, reading books opens up our minds to a world of possibilities that otherwise we wouldn't be open to.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: And yet we're seeing this downward trend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm mostly worried about the young.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Junot Diaz said, it's the closest thing to telepathy humans ever get.
--:-- Noelle King: And that's an amazing, amazingly beautiful, almost mind-boggling opportunity that goes missing.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: It just plain goes missing when you do not ever understand what that sense of interiority, that sense of immersion can give you.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'll give you the tiniest example.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Last night, okay, I probably have COVID.
--:-- Noelle King: I feel really rotten.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: You just violated your own hippo.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I'm thinking, you know, oh no, I feel bad.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: And I have to go talk to Sean in the morning.
--:-- Noelle King: I have to have a voice.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: I'm feeling miserable, self-pitying.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then I think, how can I cheer myself up?
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Did you read a book?
--:-- Noelle King: And I went and read a half a book.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Amazing. I did, I read a half a book.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And did I feel better? Yes.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: I feel good enough to come on your show.
--:-- Noelle King: How do we convince kids that they're missing out? Because the phone is just so much easier and so much more available.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: And there's quick hits of dopamine, the kind of hits that you'd have to wait to get to the end of the chapter or the end of the novel.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They're just waiting for you on TikTok every six seconds, you know?
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: How do you win against that?
--:-- Noelle King: We have to model love.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Love? We have to love. We have to model love of what happens when we are entering that state.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think part of the problem is that we give up before we try.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Great books increase the humanity of our world.
--:-- Noelle King: And I think we are succumbing to the idea that, you know, everything's efficient, everything is, you know, has to be done quickly.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: And we have to go with whatever the kids want.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How would we let our next generation just go down that slippery slope into the shallows?
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: That's what Nicholas Carr and my colleagues in Norway call shallow reading.
--:-- Noelle King: And Lady Gaga, I believe, also calls it the shallows.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In the shallow, shallow.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Ah, did she?
--:-- Noelle King: Well, good for her.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: It's not just our young, it's all of us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And when I said model, I wasn't kidding.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Parents have to model. But that requires some tough things on the parents and teachers.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, you're going against the tide.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: But if you don't, we're going to have a...
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What is that? What was that movie where everyone, the humans, they had given all of their tasks to the robots.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: And finally they were just these obese creatures.
--:-- Noelle King: What was that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Was that Wally?
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Yes, Wally.
--:-- Noelle King: Cupcake in a cup.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Wow, look at that.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: We're all going to be Wallys.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, we're going to be cerebral Wallys out there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Don't let it happen.
--:-- Mary Ann Wolf: Mary Ann Wolf, she is a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA.
--:-- Noelle King: We sincerely hope she feels better soon.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Peter Balanon-Rosen likes big books and he cannot lie.
--:-- Noelle King: Amina Al-Sadi edited, we can't deny.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We were mixed by Andrea Christensdottir and Patrick Boyd, who are great listeners.
--:-- Noelle King: And Laura Bullard fact-checked. She packs all of her books into her suitcase.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I like my suitcase.
--:-- Noelle King: This is Today Explained.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm Sean Rameswaram for him.
--:-- Noelle King: And I have to go to school now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah?
