S1 E3 What’s Happening to Reading?

Episode 3 of CELT’s Teaching@Tufts: The Podcast tackles a question on many instructors’ minds: What’s happening to reading? Hosts Carie Cardamone and Heather Dwyer welcome guest Jean Otsuki, who brings expertise in English literature, to explore why students seem to be struggling more with assigned reading, and what factors might be at play. The conversation digs into what “doing the reading” actually means across disciplines and offers practical strategies for helping students engage meaningfully with texts.

Strategies for Instructors

1. Ask yourself, why am I assigning this reading, and what do I expect students to gain from it?
2. Be transparent with students about your expectations around reading by explaining what kinds of behaviors students should exhibit once they have completed the reading. For example, should students be able to explain the main argument? Compare the text with another one? Make observations about conventions of academic writing? 
3. Normalize to students the difficulty of engaging in academic reading by describing the ways you have found it difficult, and the rewards for persisting.

Note: This episode was recorded in the Tufts Digital Design Studio during summer library construction, so you may hear some background hammering and drilling. We appreciate your patience with the audio quality!

Resources & References

Rothman, J. (2025, June 17). What’s Happening to Reading? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/whats-happening-to-reading

Teaching Reading, https://sites.tufts.edu/teaching/teaching/approaches-to-teaching/teaching-reading/ 

Distracted: Why Students Cannot Focus, by James M. Lang, New York, NY: Basic Books, 2020, 304 p. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/james-m-lang/distracted/9781541699816/?lens=basic-books

This podcast was brought to you by Tufts Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching and is hosted by Teaching at Tufts, https://sites.tufts.edu/teaching/ 

Music Attribution: Inspiring and Energetic by Universfield – License: Attribution 4.0

Transcript: S1 E3 What’s Happening to Reading?

[00:00:00]	*Music*
Carie Cardamone [00:00:08]	Welcome to Teaching at Tufts, the podcast. This podcast comes from Tufts, university, Center for the enhancement of learning and teaching, and today’s episode is hosted by myself, Carie Cardamone and Heather Dwyer, teaching at Tufts, the podcast offers teaching tips, practical strategies and highlights from recent developments in higher education for the busy instructor on the go, our first season is on the topic of engaging today’s students. What the learning science tells us this season is exploring the cognitive, emotional and environmental factors shaping how students learn today and what instructors can do to meet them where they are. The topic of today’s episode is reading, a practice many assume is integral to college. We have many assumptions about how students seek information and engage with reading when we assign it, but recently, there’s been a flurry of articles on this topic, many tied to an increase in AI use, and how that’s raising concerns for us as instructors. I just read Joshua Rothman piece in The New York article in The New Yorker, which posits, for many people, AI may be bringing the age of traditional text to an end. I think that’s a really provocative question or idea, but really the question I’d like us to surface is, is this new? Is it different today? What can we do about it? I remember back in 2010 meeting with an instructor who started a conversation with the issue that none of his students were completing the reading like they used to, and this was 15 years ago. So today, we’ve invited Dr Jean Otsuki to the show to dig into the question of what’s happening to reading, if anything, and what we can do about it.
Heather Dwyer [00:01:47]	Our colleague, Jean, an associate director at CELT, earned her PhD in English from Yale and taught English and writing at the college and high school levels and at Tufts, she specializes in working with faculty in the humanities. So welcome Jean. We’re really glad to have you today to talk about this, and maybe you can just start off by telling us a little bit about what you’ve been hearing around the topic that Carie introduced.
Jean Otsuki [00:02:08]	Yeah, thanks, Heather, thanks for having me on the show. So, I have been hearing from faculty across the disciplines, and that’s in STEM as well as in the Humanities and Social Sciences, that students seem to be having trouble completing and understanding reading assignments. I’ve also heard from faculty who may have been teaching for a long time mention how they’ve been cutting reading assignments down, but that students still seem to be finding it challenging. At the same time, I’ve been having conversations with Kristina Aikens of the StAAR Center about how she sometimes sees students who try to do the reading, but they get to class and realize that they hadn’t read for what the faculty member had expected. Maybe they were focused on details when the instructor wanted them to come with an understanding of the main argument for instance.
Heather Dwyer [00:02:53]	You’ve mentioned a few things that folks seem to be noticing, and I’m sure we’ll dig into this a little bit later, but it seems to be particularly prevalent right now. It sounds like and I’m wondering if you can share some thoughts about why you think this is happening, or maybe if you’ve heard or read other folks’ perspectives on like, what’s going on. Why are we seeing these symptoms? if you will.
Jean Otsuki [00:03:16]	Of course. So, in addition to the availability of AI generated summaries which Carie mentioned, and I think can be sometimes used to delegate reading to AI, as it were, I’ve also seen the decline in reading attributed to disruptions to teaching and learning that occurred during the pandemic lockdown. Also seen people talk about how fewer people are reading books for pleasure and culture at large. Our entertainment comes in the form of video games, streaming episodes, et cetera, and those just require a different kind of attention than reading. And I think that brings me to probably the thing that people are talking about most, which is shorter attention spans, and that’s often connected to extended time on social media. But I think it’s really important to recognize that it’s not just younger people who are having shorter attention spans. It’s all of us right, myself included.
Carie Cardamone [00:04:09]	I hear you talking a lot about people being distracted right when they’re doing something. We all hear our phones go off, or, you know, there are more distractions in our lives, or are there more distractions in our lives? You know, this also makes me think of some of what I’ve read about how high schools are asking people to read fewer long form books, and so maybe we’re not training ourselves to not be distracted and continue reading. What are you seeing with that?
Jean Otsuki [00:04:34]	Yeah, I think that’s a great point. So, James Lang points out in his book Distracted, that being distracted is not a new problem, that it is something that has been going on for as long as time, and that the normal state of our brains is actually being distracted and being able to focus is the exception to the rule. And this is not to discount the challenges of the moment, which I think are really real. There’s more distractions than ever. There’s research about how extended time on screens and social media has impacted the way the brain is wired. One thing that James Lang said that I found was really useful is that cultivating this ability to pay attention is an essential task as educators. That we’re training people to notice and to ask questions about what is important.
Heather Dwyer [00:05:23]	I think what strikes me about a lot of these reasons that we’re seeing these trends in maybe student behaviors, what I’m noticing is that these are things that are very much outside the control of students. And I can imagine it would be tempting as an instructor to notice a shift in student behaviors around perhaps their engagement with the reading, or their demonstration of ability to do the reading, even inadvertently, kind of put that on the student and say, well, there must be something going on with the student. And yet, a lot of these factors that you’ve mentioned, including things like the way that media is presented to us today and the fact that AI is so prevalent in our lives, are really outside the control of students. So it just strikes me as like an important factor to consider, I guess, as an instructor, as we’re thinking about how to handle this, and you’re also mentioning that it’s not just traditional age students or younger people who are having issues with this. It’s like everybody, right? I would include myself in that group, too. And I’m wondering, like given that, is this even really a problem, if we’re all doing if we’re all distracted, we’re all not as much engaging with long form reading, is it a problem? And to what extent would you say it really is an important skill to make sure that students are leaving a college education with.
Jean Otsuki [00:06:42]	Those are great questions, Heather. And I’m obviously biased because I have a doctorate in literature, but I think I’ll say that reading is no longer the only way that we encounter information. We listen to podcasts, we watch videos, et cetera, but I think reading is still such a primary way that we encounter information and different perspectives and reading a summary of a text means that we don’t directly encounter the authentic voice of the text, and we miss out on so many things. And I actually wanted to ask Carie to tell us a little bit about how AI generates summaries of text, and why they might not be as good of a substitute as we might think they are for reading the text directly.
Carie Cardamone [00:07:26]	I think that’s a really good question, because sometimes it is a problem and sometimes it isn’t. It depends on what you’re hoping to get from it, and if you understand what the AI is doing when you’re giving it a request. So, you might ask it for the three main points from a reading and if you just want to know, should I read this article? What’s this about? That might be good enough for that purpose, but if you’re using the AI summary in replace of yourself reading the text, it’s really important to understand that what it’s summarizing is very different than what a human would do, right? You read the text, you think about why you’re reading the text, and you try to pull out. You know, the main, most important, salient points related to that given the text as a whole. Now you can prompt AI in different ways to get better or worse summaries, but in general, what’s going to happen is the points it’s going to pull out are the points that are most well represented within its training data set, convolved with the points that are most frequently spoken about, like the text appears most frequently within the reading it’s summarizing, and you know, as you keep having conversations about the reading with the AI, it can also just pull on the conversation you’re having with it to generate text, and saying the reading is saying this when it might not even be discussed in the reading, just because you’re pulling on something you’re interested in, when it might not actually be represented within the text that you’re drawing from. The other thing I think about is like when I read authors like Tyler Cowen saying, “oh, I’m writing blog posts for AI now.” What is AI doing to us and the act of having a conversation with another human being? When you write something, when are you writing that to communicate from yourself to another human like that act of communication? What do you think about that?
Jean Otsuki [00:09:13]	Well, I think when you talk about asking AI to summarize the main points of a text that misses the fact that the form or the way something is communicated is really integral to the meaning of the text, right? And so, you miss out on all of that. I think also, AI, tends to homogenize language. And so, you’re missing out on the diversity of voices, I think about like translations of things like you’re probably missing out on the nuances of word choice and so forth, and so I think there’s a lot that’s lost if you delegate your understanding of a text to an AI summary.
Heather Dwyer [00:09:51]	It seems like this conversation is pointing out the ways that AI is a poor substitute for reading. However, I’m wondering if there are ways that we can encourage students to lean on AI as a tool as they are trying to build their skills.
Carie Cardamone [00:10:10][AG1]	I love that, because you know, some of the ways I’ve been thinking about exploring AI really have to do with using it as a partner, a task you’re doing that as a replacement. I One of the recent books I read, I had an AI chat bot open the entire time I was reading it, and every chapter, I was just kind of like, here’s something I’m thinking about, here’s something I’m wondering about. And just kind of reflecting back in that space, and oftentimes there were questions. Was a non-fiction book. It referred to field of study that wasn’t mine, and it gave me good enough answers to keep reading like in the context of what I was reading about, what I had a question about, and that was very different than asking it to tell me the main points. And I found that as sort of a partner, it brought this act of isolation; in reading myself alone into another space, it felt more interactive to me.
Jean Otsuki [00:10:59]	I could also imagine, Heather, if I’m understanding your question correctly, is that I feel like it might open up an interesting conversation about what we’re hoping for when students do the reading right? Are we just hoping that they take away these three main takeaways? And if so, how are those takeaways determined? Right? Is it? Is it just like the frequency of the words that show up. Is it something else? And what are we asking students to pay attention to when they’re doing the reading that may be different than just that? That reduction of content into bullet points.
Heather Dwyer [00:11:26]	Both of your responses make sense to me. Part of what I’m thinking about is learning to read, especially like technical or dense texts, is like difficult task. It’s hard for me, right? I still struggle with reading scientific articles, and if there’s a student who’s a novice at doing this, it might be really tempting or easy for them to just give up, basically, but if they have a non-judgmental tool that they can turn to support them in building those skills without completely delegating, I don’t know. I’m just trying to think about ways that students, and we don’t have to explore them all today, but ways that students could use AI as a partner in learning reading skills instead of a replacement. But anyway, maybe what I would like to come back to, though, Jean is one of the ideas that you kind of presented just now, which is like thinking about like, why, what you want students to get out of the reading? And I was wondering if you could explore a little bit about how the concept of reading, or what that really means, might differ from course to course, or from discipline to discipline.
Jean Otsuki [00:12:25]	I think that was that’s been really interesting to me, like, as I’ve thought more about this topic, is that reading is assigned in nearly every course, but faculty mean by quote, unquote, doing the reading can vary widely. And you know, it wasn’t until fairly recently, for instance, that I realized that close reading was not the most effective way to read a scientific article. That’s just the way I was trained, is to pay attention to words and think about nuance. And you know, when you read a scientific article that maybe not be what you’re looking for. You may just want to go to the discussion and find out what some of the main arguments were and things like that. So, I think it’s really useful as faculty members to be really clear with ourselves about what we expect students to be able to do when they come to class, quote, unquote, having the reading and then being transparent about that expectation with students. That is to say, like, what are the behaviors that students should exhibit when they have done the reading. Should they be able to explain the main argument? Are they close reading a literary text? Are they supposed to compare the text to something they read earlier in the course? Are they supposed to be making observations about the conventions of academic writing in that discipline? I think it can also be useful to recognize that even within one course or one discipline, the expectations for reading could be quite different. So, the goals for a first reading of a text of a foreign language text, for instance, may differ from your goals for a second reading of that text. And I’ve also heard faculty members say they want students to skim something. If so, I’d be curious to hear what. What do you expect students to take away from that skim? Right? Are they supposed to be able to pick up on, you know, some of the main claims of that article, for instance, and if so, please explain that to them.
Carie Cardamone [00:14:12]	We talk about critical thinking a lot with AI, and AI is interrupting our ability to think critically. And why I hate the term critical thinking is, you ask five faculty members what they mean by critical thinking, and you’ll often get a non-overlapping Venn Diagram of definitions. But are there things about reading that you think really bring into, for lack of a better word, like skills of critical thinking that we need to develop, regardless of the discipline, because there are a lot of different disciplinary techniques about what it means to read. Are there things that you think are skills to reading, and maybe it’s just attention, I’m not sure. Is it? Are there ways, habits of mind, or things that we should be bringing to reading, or we should be helping all students develop around reading.
Jean Otsuki [00:14:59]	I don’t know if this answers your question, Carrie, but I feel like reading and writing are not separate from critical thinking, right? That there are ways that we do critically think, and so I feel like those two skills, both of which I think some people see threatened by AI, seem really important still to teach is that ability to put an idea or a question into language is not separate from thinking of the idea. It’s part of that process of thinking, and so it just seems really important to preserve in our classrooms.
Heather Dwyer [00:15:36]	It seems to me that reading is also very closely tied with, I guess, information literacy, because if students are leaving their college or professional school experience encountering information that’s conveyed through written language, they need to be able to evaluate it and look at it with a critical lens, and they can’t do that if they don’t have practice.
Jean Otsuki [00:15:59]	I think information literacy, but also just listening, kind of broadly speaking, right? Is to give a different voice that sustained attention and to be really listening carefully for what are they saying?
Carie Cardamone [00:16:11]	That makes me think about one of the things I hear a lot in the space of AI is that if we’re using AI a lot, it’s a different skill to read something that AI produced and say, Yeah, that sounds good, and to like, really dig into, wait a minute, this isn’t really good. It sounds nice, but there’s not there, there. I’ve heard people describe it that way, you know, like there’s these vacuous sentences. It actually is no point in this paragraph. Like those skills are reading skills of critical analysis that I think aren’t disciplinarily tied right? Like they’re just, how do you engage with a piece of text in a way that brings your mind to the salient features of the text?
Heather Dwyer [00:16:50]	Okay, so let’s say I’m an instructor who’s noticed some concerning symptoms of perhaps students not being able to engage with the reading in the ways that I’m hoping you know some of the things that we talked about at the beginning of the episode, Jean, Do you have suggestions for what I could do about this to better support my students to engage in the reading in like, a productive way?
Jean Otsuki [00:17:12]	I mean, I think I’d start by inviting people to revisit the reading assignments ascertain for yourself, like, why are you assigning that reading? What do you expect students to gain from it or to learn from it? And then being really transparent about what your expectations are and why it would be useful for students. I think another thing that feels really important is to be able to normalize difficulty so that students may think that they are doing something wrong, if they find the reading difficult and they may give up. And so, being able to say that you also find it challenging, the challenge is worth it, right? There is reward in persisting, I think, is really useful for letting students know that they’re not making a mistake. It’s just it’s part of the learning process.
Heather Dwyer [00:17:56]	I really appreciate that last point because it also humanizes you as an instructor to students, which is important too in this moment. I think so. Thank you so much for the conversation today, Jean, and if you’re listening, we invite you to reexamine the reading that you assign in your course, think a little bit about how does that help your students learning? And then whatever you assign to make sure students can understand why it’s important, what they should take away from it and how they might do that so as much as possible, bringing in those aspects of transparency. Thank you all for joining us today, and the list of resources referenced in this episode can be found in our show notes. Until next time, keep teaching, keep learning, and don’t forget to take care of yourself.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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