Distracted Reading and Undergraduate Learning

In the fall of 2012, after Ron had showed the students in Susan’s Nineteenth-Century British Novels course some of the library’s early editions of Dickens, we fell to talking about how the session had went.  The students had been unusually subdued all semester, and were again in the library. Susan observed that the students seemed not to be making the same emotional connections to the material as in years’ past.   Ron noted that he saw a similar trend in library classes he taught for various courses, and also in the 300-level “Bible as Book” course he was co-teaching that semester.  Since both of us teach rich, dense historical materials that require long stretches of concentration, we began to wonder whether the students’ unresponsiveness to assigned reading was just coincidence (classes have personalities), or whether we were witnessing some larger shift in the reading habits of our undergraduates, perhaps one brought on by their digital habits.

In the course of our conversation, Susan mentioned a recent story on NPR about research that Natalie Phillips, a scholar of eighteenth-century British literature, had been conducting using MRIs to scan graduate students’ brains as they read Jane Austen, first in a distracted, browsing-in-a-bookstore kind of way and then in a deeply absorbed way that literary critics refer to as close reading. The research revealed a cognitive difference between distracted reading and close reading: “Phillips found that close reading activated unexpected areas: parts of the brain that are involved in movement and touch. It was as though readers were physically placing themselves within the story as they analyzed it.”[1] Phillips’s research suggests that close reading, the deep absorption that we commonly refer to as being “lost” in the text, is a different, richer cognitive experience than can be had by distracted reading.  We both began to speculate whether or not our students—who always seem to have digital device at hand—were reading in a distracted rather than an absorbed fashion, and as a result, their experiences of assigned texts were less profound and their engagement was (cognitively) more superficial.

Subsequent informal conversations with colleagues confirmed that they too found evidence of “distracted reading” among their students; and a quick search on the Web led us to realize that distracted reading was a subject of interest to a number of academics.  We decided it would be useful to draw together a group for a conversation about reading in the Vassar classroom. We applied for a Faculty Conversation Grant on “Distracted Reading and Undergraduate Learning,” and quickly found ourselves with funds to gather a group of faculty and librarians together to share common understandings of student reading practices at the present time.  In order to inform our discussion with some of the research currently being done on the science of reading in the digital age, we ordered copies of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), which brings together neuroscience and the history of reading and considers the challenges posed by the digital age to the reading brain, for everyone participating in the conversation.  Wolf, who directs the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, ultimately contends that “we must teach our children to be ‘bitextual’ or ‘multitextual,’ able to read and analyze texts flexibly in different ways, with more deliberate instruction at every stage of development on the inferential, demanding aspects of any text.”[2]  We also sent around links to several short pieces on distraction and multitasking.[3]

In the end, eighteen faculty and librarians gathered on May 23, 2013 for a Faculty Conversation, one of the largest such conversations to be held to date.  Faculty came from a variety of disciplines across campus.  The conversation was generous and bracing.  Faculty reported that students don’t seem to be reading carefully and deeply the assigned material; that they seem to have an easier time with shorter books and a harder time with older ones; that they don’t bring hard copies of books to class.  Librarians observed that library statistics show that fewer books are circulating; that students seem distracted during reference interviews and are adverse to print materials; that they are often seen multitasking in the library; and that they are frequently overheard saying that they “don’t have time to read.”  In other words, there seemed to be plenty of evidence of diminished (print) reading as well as distracted reading.

Some time was also spent considering how to respond to this generational shift in the nature of reading. If Vassar’s goal has always been to “meet the students where they are,” the faculty in the conversation group felt that we needed not only to acknowledge our students’ reading practices but also to realign our pedagogies accordingly.  Recommendations ranged from teaching courses that focused on slow reading (and thus limiting the amount of material in the course), to adding reading labs to humanities/social science courses, to teaching mindfulness, meditation and contemplative practices as a way to counterbalance distractedness.  Other ideas included more institutional approaches, such as creating a reading space (without internet access) somewhere on campus, making the teaching of undistracted reading part of the mandate of the Freshman Writing Seminars, and advocating for a campus-wide day of disconnection.   In sum, those in attendance thought distracted reading was a serious and important issue and that there should be a wider conversation among the faculty about it.  Moreover, the faculty agreed to meet again, after the fall 2013 semester, to continue the conversation.

A second Faculty Conversation Grant supported a meeting in January, 2014.  There were some new participants, though most had attended the first meeting.  Here again we did some background reading, including a chapter from Nicholas Carr’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (2011), and several short articles on the lost art of reading, the allure of print, and the differences between reading on paper and on screens.[4]  These readings delved further into the effects of technology on our ability to read, and presented the current thinking of neuroscientists and others on this topic, derived especially from the growing body of studies.  For example, Carr cites the work of University of California professor emeritus Michael Merzenich, who believes that the heavy use of online tools has neurological consequences.  Carr goes on to say that:

What we’re not doing when we’re online also has neurological consequences.  Just as neurons that fire together wire together, neurons that don’t fire together don’t wire together.  As the time we spend scanning Web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books…as the time we spend hopping across links crowds out  the time we devote to quiet reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support those old intellectual functions and pursuits weaken and begin to break apart.  The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work.  We gain new skills and perspectives but lose the old ones.[5]

As attendees of the second Faculty Conversation discussed issues like these, there was a common feeling that we’re all in the midst of great societal change.  Personal habits are changing, and people are approaching texts differently than they have in the past.  For faculty on the college campus, there exists not just the long-standing problem of getting students to read, but even if they say they have read something, have they really experienced the text beyond a cursory scanning?  This is a key question, because intensive reading has always been an integral part of the undergraduate experience.  Shouldn’t institutions of higher learning, like Vassar, now consider how this affects what they do? Do we want to continue to try to let individual faculty members address these issues as they see fit in their classroom?  Do we want to commit ourselves to creating and supporting a reading culture on campus?  Do we need to find ways to ensure that students learn how to read texts closely by the time they graduate, as (in a general way) Maryann Wolf suggests?  Should we try to connect with others in academe and elsewhere who are asking such questions and trying to find ways of answering them?

As a result of the second faculty conversation, attendees contemplated the role of the Library and the faculty Library Committee in dealing with the issue of distracted reading.  The Library, after all, has historically played an important role in supporting reading on campus.  Sabrina Pape put the matter on the agenda of a Library Committee meeting and asked Ron and Susan to attend and give an overview of the issue and a review of what had so far happened on campus (Susan was not able to attend).  The committee was engaged by the conversation, and wanted to discuss further.  Ron attended a second meeting of the committee, and brought with him ideas from Susan and others about how to move forward.  An important question before us at this point is: how do we share these concerns with the wider faculty?

Following the Library Committee meetings, Sabrina, Ron, and Susan met to consider specific ways of involving others in this conversation.  We envision multiple efforts in this direction.  As a first step, we hope to present this topic to one of the “Talking about Teaching” workshops that have been held in recent months.  We also envision bringing one of the leading experts on the science of reading to Vassar, for a lecture that would be open to the entire community.  Yet another idea has been to begin a new library series in which faculty will give presentations on a favorite book, outside of their own discipline (echoing the Art Center’s successful “Artful Dodger” series).  Of course the article you are now reading in Vassar’s online journal is another way of reaching out to others.

Perhaps there will be other events in months to come.  We wish to initiate a wider discussion, and welcome your thoughts and comments here and elsewhere.  Our hope is that the college will consider and develop a clear sense of how to move forward on this important issue that strikes at the heart of undergraduate education.