Teachers, professors look for ways to reignite student reading

Research shows reading, comprehension, college readiness in decline

Percent of leisure reading in decline. Graphic from the Washington Post

Caroline Crow, English teacher at Williams High School, is constantly having to find creative ways to engage her students with literature. She teaches 11th and 12th grade honors and on-level students in Alamance County.

Today, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, reading is in decline. The ACT wrote in a 2006 report that only 51 percent of high school graduates tested were “ready for college-level reading.” The typical 17-year-old reads fewer pages than the typical 9-year-old, according to an assessment of data by the Chronicle from the National Assessment of the Educational Progress.

Crow said when talking to other English teachers at Williams, she found that many were not assigning readings.

“None of them read, and if none of them read, then what’s your jumping off point for the next day,” she said about students at her school.

Crow has her students get in groups of 5 or 6 and discuss the assigned reading. This way, she said, there is pressure from each other to do the reading.

The Saskatoon Public School recommends a way to improve reading is to promote students to choose books to read and read in groups.

“When those pressures are on them, they are more likely to read,” she said.

Glenn Scott, associate professor of communications at Elon University, said that reading would be better if it promoted community. He said this is because of the changing digital landscape and social media feeds, where much of life is publicized.

“Any way we can make reading a group activity is likely to increase the activity,” Scott said.

But in addition to Crow’s creative techniques, she also uses quizzes.

“I decided, if I had them read outside of class, I do have them do a quiz because it holds them accountable,” Crow said.

Scott said his students will only do assigned readings in college if they know there is a quiz coming.

“People are out of a habit of reading a lot of words on a page,” Scott said.

Many students are “skimming” readings, and not fully absorbing the information on a page, according the the Chronicle.

Anne-Tillery Melson, an English major at Elon, is in a psychology class now where she sees many of her classmates reading quickly through scientific journals.

“I find that a lot of people skim readings through and not do read them,” said Melson.  

Educators argue this can be solved with quizzes that pull out key words and themes. Brad Thompson, assistant professor of communications at Pennsylvania State University wrote in the article, “If I Quiz Them, They Will Come,” for the Chronicle about how effective daily reading quizzes were.

In the piece he wrote, “Last fall, one student told me — with what I considered to be amazing candor — that mine was the only one of her courses for which she consistently did the reading.”

Not only is reading comprehension and reading in the classroom in decline, but so is reading for pleasure. The Washington Post reported that reading for pleasure has decreased by 27 percent from 2003 to 2017.

Melson loves to read in her free time, but she doesn’t believe that everyone in her literature classes feel the same.

“I’ll be in literature classes, and [students] won’t really have a favorite author or even a favorite genre sometimes,” Melson said.    

But she feels as if she struggles to read for pleasure during the school year. With her assigned texts throughout the year, she has a hard time pushing herself to read for fun.

“During the summer is when I get a lot of my reading done,” Melson said.

Crow finds that when she customizes the reading list for her students, they enjoy reading more. She choose books like Turtles All the Way Down by John Greene and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

But one of Crow’s biggest struggles is keeping her student’s focused in class and off their cell phones.

“Honors students will read on their own more, but they are very distractible. Cell phones are a huge problem in school,” Crow said.

Scott said that since the digital age and the internet, people have been reading less.

“Even though you are processing things all day long, we are not reading deeply for comprehension and inspiration and information as well as we did prior to the digital revolution,” Scott said.

Crow does not blame her students for not staying engaged with texts and staying focused on long passages.

“I feel bad for them, like in the digital world sometimes, because everything has literally changed who they are as a consumer of literature,” Crow said.