I wasn't skeptical of his experience. I was attempting to narrow the skill deficiency to be able to determine what might have been the cause and / or to consider what might be an
remedy.
One challenge here is an expectation that there is a specific skill deficiency when there is a cluster of deficiencies, overlapping, intersecting, and reinforcing each other. Pre-Covid, I noticed deficiencies in identifying key arguments, so I created a handout and devoted time to teaching that.
But now it’s also that students have fragile attention spans, making it difficult for them to sit for long periods of time without audio visual stimulation (which readings don’t provide). And students have smaller vocabularies, making it harder to get through texts without having to look up words.
And students have lower tolerance for frustration, so they give up sooner when things feel hard. And now there are tools that can read for them, so they outsource their problem, only AI will often give them the wrong answers and they’ll miss out on skill develop.
*development, not develop.
We are frustrated and we want people to take us seriously because we are seeing these problems firsthand, day in and day out and they are deeply concerning. And we are out of our depth and we have less support and higher expectations.
I think of myself as solution-oriented, which I understand your many replies are trying to push us towards, but it is also dangerous to think we can break this down to a to-do list that professors haven’t been trying to implement for the last few years.
This is a structural problem. That means we cannot “teaching and learning” workshop our way out of it. We need systemic change and collective action and we can’t have the solution rely on college professors who were not trained for this kind of work.
One more dynamic that might not be universal—our school district is increasingly relying on College Credit Plus for advanced classes. So community college and university professors are increasingly teaching students as young as 8th grade (but more frequent 10th-12th grade).
My classes are mostly not about writing, but when that's a feature (as it is this semester) I have taken to assigning multiple smaller writing tasks building up to 1-2 larger pieces. This feels inadequate, and yet I don't have a better idea.
It is also, I think, overwhelming. At the point where a student comes to us and we find they can’t easily read a New Yorker article—usually a minimum level of difficulty that colleagues report can now be a struggle—there’s no way to retool the class w/o giving up what we’re supposed to teach
This entire thread is relatable. And makes me want to remind people that teaching college students now, even compared with a decade ago, takes 2x as much work.
Oh yes - all of this. I’ve worked in academic libraries for decades and what I see from students (undergrad and grad students even) lately are many overlapping challenges when trying to find and read sources and then structure any kind of lit review.
It needs a systemic approach.
I recently watched a YouTube video where the presenter researched a question online and was shocked at the number of comments thrilled to have seen what it looks like to do online research. Apparently these students aren't getting models for this process.
One thing I found impressive about my institution was that before they sent us graduate lecturers out to be instructors, we got an actual briefing about the demographic, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds we were likely to see among our student colleagues. Strengths and challenges both.
w/ an emphasis on “in general” the dept chair and a librarian ran us through: How many are likely to be gen1 college students? How many grew up with more than one language? How many work and how many hours? What books are they likely to have read in 2ndary ed? Genre, length, complexity. & much more.
I observed a huge shift towards dumbing it down in just 3 yrs in lab between doing it and teaching it. Given examples of reports every assignment instead of only the first. Removing failure by pre doing the work then giving them the product and them adding water that was faslely labelled etc.
And then there was also the growing sense of entitlement. That they were paying us therefore they controlled us, that their experiments were more important than ours, that coming in every day was too much. But it reflected badly on your metrics if they didnt do well….
I dread to think how much further its slid since i last taught prac over 10yrs ago. But have seen an increased level of frustration of honours students when experiments fail.
There is a conflict between the narrative that students are getting dumber and the observed increase in average GPA that suggests maybe there is some fault within the education system.
I wouldn't say students are getting dumber, but that they are showing up less prepared for college than previous cohorts. AND ALSO at the same time, grade inflation is not quite at 2008 Zimbabwean dollar levels, but my goodness it is bad.
Professors (especially as individuals) shouldn't be the ones to solve the problems. Students will benefit - and therefore the professors will feel less frustration with them - when other agencies, institutions, and individuals can address specific needs rather than a generality of "less literate."
Again, I’m not sure college professors necessarily need to be the ones to diagnose the multidimensional problem we’re facing, since for many of us, that is not our expertise nor training. That doesn’t mean we can’t communicate that something is wrong and that something needs to be done.
I agree. But it's more useful to communicate to K-12 teachers that students cant find a main idea - or can't summarize - or can't complete sustained reading of more than three pages.
Communicating that college students can't read implies (intentionally or not) that K-12 isn't trying to teach them.
A colleague who has been teaching for 40 years approached me last week to ask what to do about the explosion of students claiming mental health crises. “I try to be sympathetic,” he said, “but it’s gotten out of hand.” I had no good answers on how to respond.
A thing I miss about Smith (which may be true of most SLACs) was that there were staff—deans, even—whose job it was to help students navigate crises, and who communicated to faculty with clear options for how to proceed (without imposing). That reduced administrative burden for faculty and students.
I don’t have to even entertain a thought about whether this is a real crisis or not, I know the student is already connected to services they need, and the dean is giving me ideas on how to move forward that are humane for the student but not inhumane for me. I miss that a lot.
This semester I attempted a flipped classroom where they did readings in class and watched videos for homework
I know they did do the work, but it was really unpopular.
People generally said the lectures took too long to watch (I assume because there are not the same shortcuts as you get for assigned readings) and then doing short readings with worksheets in class felt like high school "busy work"
I was really excited about the potential for this
So I am a little devastated that it was so unpopular! Though perhaps I shouldn't care that they didn't like it, since I know that they were indeed doing the work and going well on exams, both.
I’ve been thinking of having a “reading on the lawn” activity, where I just bring chairs and blankets and snacks and encourage people to bring their readings with them. My outdoor office hours during the height of the pandemic were really popular, and this would be similar, but focused on reading.
I did “reading room” in the fall: Friday afternoons for two hours, snacks etc. Then I had 5% of the grade come from “enrichment”: 5 hours total of office hours, talks, clubs, or reading room; options every day of the week. A small portion did take advantage of RR but not as many as I hoped.
I don't endorse a lot of the doomsaying and anecdata about declining student capabilities. BUT high schools and colleges are under infinite pressure to graduate a certain percentage/make a certain incoming class size. It has never, ever been an absolute threshold of merit and damn the consequences.
To be clear, I collect data in/through my class, so what I’m sharing is not anecdotal but measured in self-reported surveys and graded assignments, including student answers on quizzes and exams. Yes, I’m THAT social scientist who has repeated quiz questions over decades for data analysis.
Sorry, that wasn't aimed at you, and I know there are people studying this in ways that are rigorous. And that there are thornier meta-questions that even the best studies won't resolve.
I see some (but def. not all) of the issues people talk about, but I'm not sure they mean what we think they do.
No Child Left Behind shifted high school assessments to standardized multiple choice testing. I haven't thought to specifically ask about reading, but I've talked to multiple college juniors and seniors who have never written a 5 page paper, and consider 3 pages to be "long."
And large class sized have made high school teachers rarely assign writing that requires more than 3 pages to respond. Most years, I taught approximately 120 students. There isn't time to adequately read and provide useful feedback for long pieces of writing.
