In this Issue
Do college students read books anymore? It’s an age-old question that never fails to pluck an emotional chord of self-doubt in educators and librarians. In 2018, this thorny issue was blithely assumed to be a settled question by a New York Times reporter who announced that the current generation of college students “rarely reads books or emails, breathes through social media, feels isolated and stressed but is crazy driven and wants to solve the world’s problems.”
After a decade of conducting large-scale research on college students, I knew the claims in this article weren’t entirely accurate. For instance, a 2015 Pew survey found that college-age students are more likely to have read a book in the last year than their elders. Project Information Literacy’s own 2018 news engagement survey of 5,844 U.S. undergraduates indicates 76% of students got their news from reading stories on news sites last week, not just from their social media feeds. All of this is to say: Students do read books, they do read the news, but just not in the same way that their professors do.
The PIL Provocation essay I have written, “Reading in the Age of Distrust,” digs into recent reading research to better understand how college students experience reading in our current tumultuous times. The essay explores how reading, the venerable learning skill, is often overlooked on college campuses when reading deeply and analytically may be more important than ever. How do students develop into the critical readers that college professors expect them to become when these students inhabit an increasingly contentious world surrounded by rapid and unsettling changes to an information ecosystem, plagued by an endless stream of misinformation?
Algorithms. Clickbait. Disinformation. Filter bubbles. Clearly, the stakes for developing college students into deep and analytical readers have gotten higher. Inside and outside of academia, students find themselves embroiled in debates about a merry-go-round of topics, such as climate change, vaccinations, and election outcomes, spinning with the newest rumors. These issues are stoked by a flow of conflicting opinions masquerading as “alternative facts” and delivered at warp speed. Determining what information to trust can be perplexing for even the most discerning readers.
How to help students become better readers is an ever-changing question, a braided river that has flowed through the educational terrain for more than a century. Our divided society calls for asking new questions about reading: Have educators come to regard reading as such a basic skill that we don’t have to think about it much, even though it has actually become quite challenging? Is reading an essential information literacy skill being overlooked by academic librarians as a key part of understanding, evaluating, and creating information?
As I write in my essay, “if we believe that college educates students to live in and influence the world, then we — educators and librarians — must bring more intentionality to reading assignments.” There are steps we can take to make the invisible practice of reading visible and teachable. We must do more to prepare students with the critical reading skills they need for making sound choices in a fast-paced and chaotic world. Clearly, it’s time for a college reading reset.