COLLEGE STUDENTS BASICALLY DON’T KNOW HOW TO READ ANYMORE
THIS IS GRIM. | The ______ Byte
In a recent editorial for Slate, Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor at Illinois’ North Central College, sheds light on a concerning trend among college students: a significant aversion to reading. Over the past five years, particularly exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, Kotsko and his colleagues have observed a startling decline in students’ reading resilience. What once was a standard expectation of around 30 pages of reading per class meeting has now dwindled, with students expressing intimidation at anything over 10 pages and leaving even 20-page readings with minimal comprehension.
The roots of this issue extend beyond the pandemic, implicating factors like the omnipresence of smartphones as the primary medium for reading and the entrenched “teach-to-test” pedagogy prevalent in primary and secondary education. Educational shifts, such as the “balanced literacy” movement, have prioritized reading comprehension over phonics, leading to what Kotsko terms “vibes-based literacy,” where students lack the ability to sound out unfamiliar words. Furthermore, teachers’ tendency to assign shorter readings, often geared towards standardized tests rather than genuine educational enrichment, further exacerbates the problem.
The consequences are dire, as Kotsko emphasizes the necessity for students to develop the ability to engage with extended narratives and arguments. Beyond academia, these skills are crucial for navigating professional environments and understanding complex issues. Yet, the prevailing trends in education seem to hinder rather than foster such capacities…………
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Rising Dough
How do the evolving reading habits of students, influenced by factors like smartphone usage and pedagogical trends, impact businesses and marketers seeking to engage with this demographic effectively?
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It might be harder for businesses and marketers to engage with this demographic because of their smartphone usage and this might make it so that marketers would have to try a different approach to communicate with them effectively.
This might affect how business operates and they make make new strategies to gain customers that don’t require a lot of work.
This makes it more difficult for businesses and marketers to engage with the demographics due to this hurdle being smartphones and technology and how it is changing some of these things for the worse.
How do the evolving reading habits of students, influenced by factors like smartphone usage and pedagogical trends, impact businesses and marketers seeking to engage with this demographic effectively?
Evolving reading habits of students impact businesses and marketers because they will have to learn to adapt to students way of collecting information. They can do this by making their content more visually appealing and engaging content that can be easily collected through a smartphone.
The evolving reading habits of students, influenced by factors like smartphone usage and pedagogical trends, can impact
businesses and marketers seeking to engage with students effectively need to adapt their strategies to align with the evolving reading habits influenced by smartphone usage and pedagogical trends.