University students are increasingly unable to read a whole book as they simply don’t have the concentration spans required, nor are they able to understand complex, nuanced arguments, academics have said.
Lecturers at leading British universities are having to actively encourage students to read beyond the set texts, and have noticed that students are increasingly unwilling to read whole texts. They say they believe internet culture is to blame, as young people nowadays are used to receiving arguments in the form of 800-1000 word articles. Anything beyond that, they say, is now proving too challenging.
“Incoming undergraduates have had their attention habits fashioned in a totally different world than that of those who are teaching them,” Tamson Pietsch, fellow in history at the University of Sydney told Times Higher Education (THE).
“This can lead to a clash of expectations and also of abilities on both sides of the equation. In many ways, incoming students absorb information quickly, they understand the power of images, and are adept at moving between different types of sources and platforms. They are perhaps less used to concentrating for long periods of time and working through the nuances of an argument developed over the course of many pages.”
Jenny Pickerill, professor in environmental geography at the University of Sheffield, said of full length books: “students struggle with them, saying the language or concepts are too hard.
[…]
