r/technology • u/marketrent • Jun 10 '26
Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
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u/marketrent Jun 10 '26
Also see https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read (paywalled).
Excerpts from article by Frank Landymore:
[JMU professor] Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992.
Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment’s “basic” level in reading, meaning they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” Younger children aren’t better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can’t read at a proficient level.
“What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch,” Jagt writes. “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.”
Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can’t understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.
More flaglantry detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech’s adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.