The Fall, and Rise, of Reading

Students’ preparedness for the kind of reading they would do in college buckled as they grew older. “Only 51 percent of 2005 ACT-tested high school graduates are ready for college-level reading,” the ACT wrote in a 2006 report. “And, what’s worse, more students are on track to being ready for college-level reading in eighth and 10th grade” — about 62 percent — “than are actually ready by the time they reach 12th grade.”

80% of students "normally did the reading"

​1981

20% of students "normally did the reading"

​1997

Other studies on "reading compliance" show that 20 to 40% of students do the reading.

But a deeper look at the research on reading and other evidence paints a more complicated picture of one of higher education’s most basic operations. It is a picture that reflects the priorities of students and professors, the influence of broader social trends and mores, and the ambiguous role that educational attainment seems to have in encouraging — and sometimes discouraging — reading.
The picture is also easily fogged. For more than a century, scholars have fought over whether reading has declined. They’ve warred over whether problems came from schools or society at large. They’ve blamed students, instructors, standards, technology, conservatism, liberalism, demographics, recessions, divorce rates. In the late 1980s, when a decline in reading scores was blamed on the “permissive ’60s,” two scholars pored through a century of research to settle the question. The best they came up with was an “educated guess”: It was hard to say.

The data aren’t so clear. “Measuring how much people are reading is a bit like judging levels of happiness,” wrote Naomi S. Baron, a professor emerita of linguistics at American University, in her book Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World. Studies vary by scope, time period, and definition — one analysis may show a steep decline in time spent reading, while another shows an increase among many young people who read online books, magazines, and news.

The average college student in the United States spends six to seven hours a week on assigned reading, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement (which started tracking the statistic in 2013). Other countries report similarly low numbers. But they’re hard to compare with the supposed golden age of the mid-20th century, when students spent some 24 hours a week studying, Baron says. There were far fewer students, they were far less diverse, and their workload was less varied — “studying” meant, essentially, reading books.

Students’ preparedness for the kind of reading they would do in college buckled as they grew older. “Only 51 percent of 2005 ACT-tested high school graduates are ready for college-level reading,” the ACT wrote in a 2006 report. “And, what’s worse, more students are on track to being ready for college-level reading in eighth and 10th grade” — about 62 percent — “than are actually ready by the time they reach 12th grade.” (...) While those with bachelor’s and graduate degrees maintained the highest levels of literacy overall, those groups also experienced the steepest declines. Just 31 percent of college graduates were considered proficient readers in 2003, by that test’s definition, down from 40 percent in 1992.

Mary E. Hoeft noticed a persistent reluctance among students at the two-year college to do the assigned reading. She surveyed 124 students in two sections of a seminar meant to help first-year students make the transition to college: Had they done the reading? Those who said yes wrote three-sentence paraphrases, which she searched for any topics or anecdotes that could show basic comprehension.

--> 46% (57ss) claimed they had read the assignments, but just 55% (31ss) of that group could demonstrate basic comprehension of the material.
--> 75% (93) of the class had not really read it.

The data showing that reading habits and literacy are dropping are “cut from the same cloth,” says David Jolliffe, of Arkansas, who was also a chief reader for the AP English exam. To him, trends in English pedagogy and a turn toward standardized testing have upended students’ incentives to read: “We have young people who are coming away from high school with a very sort of test-driven training — I won’t call it education — training in reading.”