We may be witnessing the disappearance of a form of thinking, one shortened reading assignment at a time.
Baron and Mangen’s study of faculty in the United States and Norway suggests that long-form reading is declining in higher education.
Many faculty reported assigning less reading than before, reducing complexity when students struggled, and replacing some reading with videos or other media. Large majorities also believed digital technologies were contributing to shallower academic reading.
This is not an isolated finding.
Sutherland-Smith argued years earlier that reading on the Web requires different literacy practices. Digital readers move quickly, follow links, scan, interpret multimedia, and make rapid decisions about relevance and credibility.
Delgado and colleagues later found a small but consistent comprehension advantage for print across 54 studies and 171,055 participants. The difference was larger under time pressure and with informational texts.
Put these three papers together and a troubling pattern appears: We moved reading onto screens. Reading became faster and more fragmented.
Students completed less of it and faculty responded by assigning less. Then shorter attention spans became the justification for even shorter texts.
At what point does adaptation become surrender?
Long-form reading asks students to remain with an argument, retain earlier ideas, follow evidence across pages, tolerate difficulty, and revise their interpretations.
Now AI can summarize the chapter, extract the main ideas, generate discussion points, and answer questions about a book the student never opened.
The next crisis in education may not be that students cannot read. It may be that our courses no longer require them to.
References
Baron, N. S., & Mangen, A. (2021). Doing the reading: The decline of long long-form reading in higher education. Poetics Today, 42(2), 253–279.
Delgado, P., Vargas, C., Ackerman, R., & Salmerón, L. (2018). Don’t throw away your printed books: A meta-analysis on the effects of reading media on reading comprehension. Educational Research Review, 25, 23–38.
Sutherland-Smith, W. (2002). Weaving the literacy web: Changes in reading from page to screen. The Reading Teacher, 55(7), 662–669.
#LongFormReading #HigherEducation #ReadingComprehension #DigitalLiteracy #CriticalLiteracy #AIinEducation #EdTechl
Written by Med Kharbach, PhD
