Lost in the Scroll: Homeschooling Reading Comprehension
From Fo Shizzle to Skibidi Rizzler: The Troubling Decline of Reading Comprehension in the Digital Age
Over my 18 years in education, I’ve witnessed plenty of changes. Pants have shifted from the skinny jeans of the 2010s to the wider barrel-leg jeans of the 2020s. The social media platforms favored by young people have transitioned from MySpace to Facebook, then to Twitter, and now TikTok. Language trends have also evolved, with kids moving from saying fo shizzle to skibidi rizzler. The longer I remain in this field, the more I measure time not by years but by the trends that come and go.
Not all trends are goofy, though. In fact, some can be quite alarming. Whenever I meet with other educators who have been in the profession for a while, I have gotten in the habit of asking if they’ve noticed any changes in students’ reading comprehension over the years. Every single one, without exception, has reported that students’ reading comprehension has drastically declined over the years. This tracks with what I have noticed as well—a consistent decline in students’ ability to read a text and understand what it is saying.
Assuming this trend is accurate (and from all anecdotal evidence I have seen, I believe it is), what is behind it?
Understanding Reading Comprehension
First, let’s flesh out the concept of reading comprehension.
Comprehension is more than just knowing how to read. The ability to read involves interpreting written symbols and extracting information and meaning by visually decoding text. This foundational skill is what we teach children as they learn their ABCs and figure out how to pronounce strings of letters that form words.
Proper reading comprehension goes beyond this basic level. It means fully understanding what is being read, which requires actively engaging with the text. This includes making connections with existing knowledge, inferring meaning (“reading between the lines”), and understanding context. Key skills involved in this process include:
- Summarizing
- Identifying the main idea
- Making inferences
- Visualizing
- Asking meaningful questions about the material
Reading comprehension is, therefore, an essential tool for any student to possess if they hope to be able to make sense of what they are reading. Have you ever had to read something highly technical or outside your field of expertise? Even though you are reading the words, you have no idea what is being said. For someone with poor reading comprehension, this is their reality reading almost anything. Children with poor reading comprehension may be able to perform low-level tasks like finding and retrieving answers from the text. However, they will struggle with questions that require them to analyze a text and discuss its meaning.
Signs of poor reading comprehension in children include:
- Difficulty explaining what a text is “about”
- Struggling to understand messages in a text that are not clearly spelled out
- Inability to answer basic questions about what was just read
- Little or no understanding of context; inability to pick up on contextual clues
- Difficulty answering questions that require pulling together information from different places in the reading
- Complaining that they “didn’t get” the reading
What Educators Are Seeing: A Decline in Comprehension
This is precisely the sort of feedback I and other longtime educators are increasingly getting from students. For example, I have been assigning Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail to my American history students for at least 15 years. Whereas students in 2010 understood the reading easily and could answer analytical questions about King’s message expressed in the letter, current students increasingly find the letter incomprehensible. If I ask, they can cherry-pick keywords or phrases from the letter, but they struggle to analyze the text or summarize its central point. I get more messages from students who “don’t get” the letter or don’t understand the structure of King’s arguments presented therein. They increasingly need guidance and hand-holding to formulate a basic understanding of a text that their peers from a decade ago easily understood.
The Role of the Internet: The Shallows Effect
One thing I have noticed about this phenomenon is that, though they wrestle with comprehension, today’s students are very good at finding and retrieving specific bits of information—factoids, names, quotes, individual tidbits of information isolated from any larger context. I was puzzled. I wondered why kids were so good at this sort of thing but struggled with textual analysis. Then I came across Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brain.
The Shallows was published in 2010 at the dawn of the social media age. In this Pulitzer Prize-nominated work, Nick Carr sought to assess if and how increased digital content consumption affects how our brains process information. While many of us understandably worry about what sort of content our children will find online, Carr’s book focuses more on the medium itself. The Internet, says Carr, is a place of perpetual distraction. This is partly due to the online ecosystem’s impulsive nature, where everything hinges on clicks and web traffic. However, it is also due to how information is presented. Reading a book forces a slower, more focused mode of concentration. In contrast, most of us going online have multiple tabs open simultaneously, leaping from site to site as we try to multitask.
Content is increasingly created to be digested in bite-sized chunks instead of long-form presentations. When we encounter a page with lots of information (like a Wikipedia entry), we tend to quickly scroll down until we find the specific nugget of data we need, swiping over the reams of information that form the context for this data. According to Carr, the result is that we train our brains to be perpetually distracted, a disposition that “follows” us into our offline interactions. We have become increasingly accustomed to thinking of the written word not as a body of literature to understand but as reams of data to be sorted for specific content.
The acquisition of wisdom requires focused reading and sustained, solitary concentration. This is not consistent with what we find in the online environment. If kids are spending more time online than ever before (and the research suggests they are), it follows that this hyper-distracted online experience will increasingly shape each successive generation’s engagement with the written word.
Reclaiming Deep Reading Skills in the Digital Age
Fortunately, such an outcome is not a bygone conclusion. If we want our children to be analytical readers who can engage with a text meaningfully, we must ensure that their online time is balanced with a more than equal amount of time spent reading books. The Shallows persuasively argues that the cognitive experience of reading a book is fundamentally different from processing online content. Whereas online content generates habits of distraction, paper books require discipline, focus, and concentration. One helpful trick many parents do is tether screen time to book time with a ratio. For example, for every half hour of screen time a child wants, he must spend 45 minutes reading a book. This ensures that screen time never becomes the child’s primary exposure to information.
We can, furthermore, deliberately work to build the habits of engaged, analytical reading in our children. Instead of just giving them a book and setting a 45-minute timer, read aloud with them and discuss the ideas and themes of the book. Engage in exercises that get them to analyze the text. Help them recognize things like implicit messages, context clues, and how to “read between the lines.” In other words, equip them with literary skills that help them understand the many different ways a piece of writing can speak to us.
Conclusion: Building a Generation of Analytical Readers
If you’d like to learn more about building strong reading skills in your children, check out the following articles from the Homeschool Connections blog:
8 Tips: Homeschool Reading Comprehension
Why Teens Aren’t Reading Books (And How Parents Can Change That)
Five Strategies for Building Strong Reading Habits
What are your thoughts or questions on this topic? You can join me and other homeschooling parents at our Homeschool Connections Community or our Facebook group to continue the discussion!
