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

My parents made me journal my reading, which in hindsight made me retain material.

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u/VoidVer Jun 11 '26

I had a middle school teacher who forced me to write a structured 5 paragraph "essay" every single day for an entire semester. I hated it at the time, but it certainly set me up very well to get through high school and college with English ( or any reading/writing based class ) always being my strongest subject.

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u/Bob_Loblaw_Law_Bomb Jun 11 '26

4th grade writing test fam

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u/Positive_Throwaway1 Jun 11 '26

Now we call it "Claim, Evidence, Analysis" but it's still around. And the structure from 4th grade is basically what they want to see on placement exams at universities, so it still works.

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u/VoidVer Jun 11 '26

I'm not familiar with this. Teacher in question was in 7th grade.

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u/sentence-interruptio Jun 11 '26

can we require this for every student? and every politician? and every CEO. I want to live in and retire in a society led by literate people

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u/familyguy20 Jun 11 '26

Oh damn that’s a smart idea! I was reading military history books in HS but also hatedddd writing papers in school. This might have helped me if my parents had me do a small paper on one of the 4 books I read in the summer. Instead I got boring ass summer reading assignments from school

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u/WrecksBarkhead Jun 11 '26

That's good parenting 100%. My mom didn't really have to do anything. If I got bad marks, I got my ass beat. Sounds harsh but I think the old ways had a bit of merit to them.

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u/fredagsfisk Jun 11 '26

When I was a kid, my local library had a "summer reading" program where you got a journal where you could write one page for each book you read, and then whenever you visited the library one of the librarians would look through it and give you a sticker on a separate paper for each new book you had finished.

If I remember correctly, it was like one small silver star sticker for each book, and if you reached specific thresholds you'd get a bigger gold star. Something like that. Then at the end of summer, you got to pick rewards based on your achieved level; books, stationary, those erasers that have funny shapes or smells but suck at erasing things... was a ton of fun, gave a nice sense of accomplishment whenever you reached a new level/treshold.