I just read a headline that said gen Z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence, even read a sentence, Like, that's sensational, my future voice sensational.
Yeah.
I was just like, Okay, what's going on here?
Because I find that very hard to believe that you can make it all the way to college and not know how to read.
Yeah, I don't believe it.
Right, I simply don't. I simply don't believe it.
I'm TT and I'm Zukiah and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. All right, so obviously we're gonna be talking about reading and literacy and how it's changed over the years, I mean, from generation to generation. I also saw a headline that said that Gen Z is the first generation to cognitively underperform compared to like previous generations.
I don't know.
I feel like this gets me right into what I know. I feel like every generation from my grandparents down, okay, was always saying y'all don't read enough. Y'all don't read enough. It feels like more to say everybody's just saying you
don't read enough, you don't read enough. Yeah, we're always just pointing out the younger ones and saying, y'all got too much technology, you don't read enough, your attention span is whatever, whatever, Because I remember when we were kids, the big thing was, oh, all y'all kids do was watch TV. Y'all need to get outside and play, and we were like, okay. The one that I used to hear was like, do you know your work? Do you
know your school books? The way you know those lyrics? No, okay, write those lyrics down on PA committed.
This song by Bone Thugs. I've committed this this song by Bone Thugs and Harmony to hers.
I pledge allegiance to the bone. Okay.
Boom boom boom boom boom boom. Man, they don't know what they've on.
I think I'm also part of the problem, okay, because the headlines have been blaming everything on reading and reading comprehension. But I've been spreading some misinformation myself. I saw a thread and it was like, the men can't flirt because they don't read. They don't read enough to be able to text you something that's emotionally captivated. I said, repost, I took it down lest you took it down down because I said, girl, you don't have no stats to
back this up. Do you have gender separated statistics about men reading?
No, you don't.
Okay, so let's get into what we want to know.
I want to know how much of this is just clickbait, like just headlines to grab your attention.
And I think before anybody panics and starts blaming TikTok, we need to really slow down and really understand what the research says. So I want to know actually factually what is going on, Like how are they making these headlines, what is it based off of and what does it mean for future generations?
And what does it mean for millennials and Gen xers and things.
Like that, Because we're all living in the same society right, interacting with one another.
We're working with each other at our jobs. Okay, so let's jump into it.
I think we're ready. Yeah, So I'll tell you. I did some googles I've looked at.
I did some googles because I said, these headlines are referencing specific studies, right, and it's time to start picking some of those apart. I looked at some of the studies that they reference, but also global literacy rates. I also looked at our reading by state. Also, I started looking at our math. We've been It's not looking so bad for the math. I'm feeling good. Yes, I think where we should start is what is little like? How is literacy defined?
Okay?
Because reading isn't just about knowing words, It's about following arguments, understanding nuance, detecting false hoods within a sentence, and connecting ideas across time. Okay, so let's jump into it then. So now that we have established what literacy is, right, let's actually talk about the study. So there are a couple of different sources to pool. There are these large
international assessments that track skills over time. There are these national assessments that track skills over time, and some of those skills are reading, comprehension, vocabulary, problem solving. But then there are things that are measures of people's time being spent. So they might ask do a survey and say how much time do you spend reading per week or how
much do you spend per day? So we're pulling all this information together to understand this trend and What researchers notice is that starting around the mid twenty two, scores stopped going up. And those scores were like what you said, reading comprehension, vocabulary, problem solving and things like that, and in some cases they went down. But the decline wasn't
across everything. It was concentrated just on literacy heavy tasks, Okay, And I think that's important because the headlines that say they're not as smart is literacy the measure of smartness, right, So we're talking about understanding long passages, following multi step arguments, interpreting written information and pulling meaning from context. That's not anything.
It's not raw intelligence, it's not creativity, is not innovation, and it's not if you know how to use the operating system on your phone or your other technological device. Because gen Z is kicking everybody's but right, we're looking at you baby boomers. Okay, I'm tired of being the geek squad on call. Yeah. I think one important detail is that these stud he's compare people at the same age, just born in different years. So it's not kids today
versus adults. It's eighteen year olds now versus eighteen year olds twenty or thirty years ago, and when the research is dig deeper, they actually find something interesting. They're finding that gen Z performs just fine on short discrete task okay, okay, but the performance drops when they need sustained attention and deep reading.
Okay.
So what that tells us is that this isn't about ability, It's about exposure and practice. And if your daily life doesn't require long form reading, your brain gets less training in that aspect.
But you might not need that, you know.
I think you're making a very good point. One of the things that I've been seeing lately on the internet, I saw somewhere where somebody said practice makes permanent. If I don't have to practice it, it's not part of my permanent routine.
You know exactly.
I think we talk about this a lot, and the comparison our always make is that before calculators, everybody was doing the math by paper and doing it in their head. Then calculators came out, and then the mathematicians and scientists were saying, if you use a calculator, you're not really smart because it's something else is doing the work for you. And I'm like, well, now calculators are ubiquitous. They're on our phone, they're on our laptops, they're everywhere helping us
calculate things. You can type in math problems into Google and it'll spit out the answer, and it just makes you more efficient, Like why take all this time to try and work this out when you know you can get to the answer and move on quickly. I think the other thing is I've been seeing a lot of people blaming what we're seeing, and I'm saying what we're seeing. I'm putting up the quotation marks because what's being said,
what we're seeing is not what's being said. But they're saying like, oh, these declines in literacy are because of the pandemic. But the studies are also pointing out that that decline showed up before the pandemic. So it's not just I'm tired of people blaming everything on zoom. Zoom does have some qualities, oh my gosh. And the same research shows that adults are actually reading less too, and that's backed up by other studies, including the American Time You study.
So this isn't a specific failure quote unquote.
Of gen z. This is across the board.
We're all reading less.
Yeah, we can see it in the data. So that same study, it looked at over two hundred and thirty thousand Americans over twenty years, and reading for pleasure, not reading for your job, reading for whatever you for pleasure has dropped about forty percent.
Okay. The other thing is.
Everybody's talking about the kids, but who's reading to the kids? Okay, only two percent of adults said that they read with kids every day. So when we talk about gen Z struggling with deep reading, it's not that they're slacking off while everybody else is like buried in books and bookworms and everything like that. This is a cultural shift towards screens and short form content, and they're just the generation that's growing up inside of that shift.
Yeah.
Now, I think it's less about blaming a generation and more about asking a more context dependent question, like what happens now when we have a society where fewer people can deeply read and analyze and question what they're consuming. And I think this is the gotcha, gotcha because we're having this conversation about fewer people being able to deeply read, analyze and question what they're consuming. But this is at a time when literacy is actually a huge success story.
So if you look back two hundred years, only one in ten people across the world. So now we're talking globally, not just in the United States, only one in ten could read and write. But today that is basically flipped. Those other nine those are the people who are literate across the globe. And so mass literacy is a very recent phenomenon, okay, and that isn't something that happened by accident.
Countries poured money and policy into basic education and so the result was that literacy expanded, Gender gaps and race gaps started to close. And that's part of what made modern life, the life that we're living now so possible, having democracy, science, the Internet, all of it. So now we're asking what does it mean if we have literacy on paper but we're not practicing deep reading in real time, in real life and talking about policy like bring back
the book program and the pizza Hut coupons. Okay, yes, oh my god, remember when you have Yes when and I remember I was at school. We had like book reading competitions and like the class that want would get a pizza party. I don't think they're doing that anymore. So are they doing pizza parties? The kids even still eat pizzas, and they would slice those pizzas into the hunterred slices, A hundred slices right, one slice would be as thin as a hand.
Gg'd lying, y'all, it wasn't.
It wasn't like this. It wasn't it was it was awful. It was awful.
But I think everything you're saying is so so true. If you can't slow down and deeply read.
You're vulnerable.
A big factor is that how we read has changed. We don't read long form text the way that previous generations did. We skim and scroll and jump from linkedlin. My friend is jumping from linked very Okay, if you're not subscribed to her blog, you need to Okay, a thousand links.
It's the land of a thousand links and footnotes.
Okay, on that souf. I think you know.
The interesting thing, though, is we've been talking about the kids and the younger generations. But let's zoom out again globally. If you look like in the Middle East and North Africa, the younger generations there are way more literate than the older generations. So that even that's another interesting caveat too. Not only do we have more people reading, we have more younger people reading them before and so I think, like you said, we're just adapting to the way we
see information. Yeah, your brain adapts to what you ask it to do. And if you're reading happens in captions and tweets and headlines, you're training your brain for speed and not depth. And I think the other thing the unsaid is like when we look at how we're measuring literacy, like there are these tests, these checkpoints, like a lot of teaching to the test, and you know, I have a whole thing about that multiple choice Yes, I love
a scantron sometimes ye okay. I think also we start to get kids who are just trying to eliminate wrong answers instead of thinking about what the right answer actually is and thinking and sitting with the information. So I want to get on my soapbox about that. But I think if we're going to look at the United States, we do have to look at the nation's report card, and we should be I don't know, I feel like
we should be a little scared to show it. It's been tracking reading and some of the other subjects like math and writing for many decades, okay, And I think some of this also some of the rumblings about literacy have come from that particular assessment. It's national, it has state level information. You can go all the way down
the districts. And I think we should focus on the last two sets of reading data that we have, and that's for grades four and eight and in twenty twenty four and twenty twenty two is where we have test results for reading. So overall, if you look at the average of both the fourth and the eighth grade reading assessments, there is a significant decrease in reading in twenty twenty
four compared to twenty twenty two. A couple of things to point out about that, though, is that both fourth grade and eighth grade are down on average, and that's not just a gen Z thing, because fourth grade in twenty twenty four is technically Generation Alpha. Eighth grade is right on the line for gen Z. Also, you can break this down into percentiles. Percentiles always be messing with with. Okay, go slow form, Okay, So I like to start right in the middle. I say, if I line everybody up
from lowest score to highest score, where's the fifty percent mark? Right? Everybody at the fifty percent mark and below is in the fiftieth percentile. So the higher the number, the more people that are under you. So you want to be high, and if you are an achiever, you want to be high. So like when people say you're in the ninety fifth percentile, that means ninety five percent of the people that took the test.
Score lower than you. They have a value that falls below you.
Okay, Okay, So people have been saying, oh, the reading is down, reading is down, but for our high performing readers, So people that were in the ninetieth percentile twenty twenty two to twenty twenty four, no significant change. They didn't get any didn't get any better at reading, at literacy, didn't get any worse. And that's for both the fourth grade and the eighth grade. So it's not like, oh, everybody just dropped. Most of the drops were happening at
the tenth, twenty fifth, and fiftieth percentile range. Okay, And so that's something to kind of pay attention to as well. So once we start, the more information we have, the more we can, you know, start to really get a full story. Yeah, because then that makes me feel like the gap between people is widening, and I want I'm curious to know is it specific demographics of people or kids that are following in the fiftieth percentile or below? And I guess we will only know that with more research.
And I think that's the part of the story. I think we're not talking about enough. Okay, So we're talking about a couple things. See, now, you got me all in my education back.
I call them jales.
She's an educator, y'all.
We're talking about fourth and eighth grade, right.
And we have numbers from twenty twenty two and twenty twenty four for them, but we don't have numbers for twelfth grade. When people are graduating and going out into the world. We don't have a reading assessment for them any later than twenty nineteen. So the last reading assessment we know about what a twelfth grader is doing was in twenty nineteen.
Okay wow.
And because there have been recent cuts the National Assessment Governing Board that's who sets the policy for the nation's report card, they're saying, hey, we're under pressure because there have been budget cuts and we're trying to find some budget deficiencies. So they are proposing that they won't be doing that comprehensive test at the state level for twelfth graders to assess their reading. They won't be doing that until twenty thirty two. Wow, So we're losing a clear
ability to compare over time what happens. So if you care about literacy, you don't just care about what's happening in the fourth grade and eighth grade. You care about literacy as a life outcome. And we're losing our ability to look at that. And that is a direct result of cuts to the Department of Education.
Oh my gosh.
So we're going to be feeling the effects of this for a very long time. I mean, if you're not making those assessments, like you said, how can you make changes? How can you say, Okay, this is we're going to start putting more focus on this area or that area.
If you don't know what the problem is, how do you fix it?
I mean, and I think that's part of the thing. That's something we're seeing complaints about across the board. We're making these cuts to these systems that track and that become like our early warning signs. You know, this is not to get us back to the biology, but this
was the same thing we saw with bird flu. You know, when we had the episode people saying we don't have the monetoring systems that we had before, and so now we're going to be in a position where we're not going to be able to identify where the gaps are closing, where they're widening, if policies are working in there or not, because.
We're not measuring these things.
Oh my goodness.
And so the bottom line is that this isn't a kids these days are lazy situation. This is about systems, the education system, the text system, and attention economies. Like because the Department of Education, when you think of public schools and how they get their funding and the tests that the students have to take, they are like, we have to make sure that these kids pass these tests
and things like that. But if they're not even looking at the tests, they're being able to assess the outcomes, Oh my gosh, we're cooked.
We're cooked cooked. Okay.
I think the other thing that's really worth saying, and we've kind of woven it into the undertones, but I want to say it explicitly. Gen Z and Jen Alpha, they are incredible at things that the older generation, oh my gosh, don't stand a chance. Yes, absolutely, visual literacy, digital navigation, pattern recognition across platforms. It's more likely that somebody in gen Z is going to recognize AI before
I do. Listen, Okay, Like there's times where I'm there was a TikTok of rabbits jumping on a trampoline at night, and I was like, yo, this is so cool, and the gen z is in the comments are like this is AI clearly, and I.
Was like oops, oopsy oops, yeah, like oh oh yes.
Yeah, I was talking about a different video with the bunnies jumping on a trampoline.
Never mind, never mind, never mind.
Yeah, it's just like those skills don't just show up in traditional intelligence tests, like that's when you're taking a test. They're not showing you things like that. And so gen Z isn't less smart. They're just a different kind of smart, like the type of smart they are values different things. Back in the day day, Yeah, you need to read you know this war.
And peace and all these things like that. Now you don't, for real.
You can read it in your leisure but it's not something that you know defines like who is intelligent.
And who isn't.
I think the other thing is that we've come to a point where we've started to say, well, you know, you don't know what this word means or in the same way. You know, just like when people are saying the same way you're talking about calculators, that's the same thing people are saying when that little squiggly line used to come up in word. And I'm like, I can write click and see what that means. Okay, I can write exactly what's happening. Yeah, And I'm like, you can.
Know what every word is in the headline and still not understand what it means for you.
And you know, when we first started Dope last this is something we talked about, you know, and such a good point. We first started with science literacy and then we talked about financial literacy and civic literacy, media literacy. Thinking about science literacy just off the top and thinking about some of our early episodes, like it's not just like, do you know what antibiotics are? That's not what for us,
that's what we're thinking about for science literacy. It's like when you see somebody say drug X cures disease, lie, you have to stop and ask like was that in mice?
Was it in humans?
You know? Was it thirty people or three thousand people. Was it a randomized trial or was it self reported?
Healing right now?
Right?
Who paid for it? Shit?
It?
Yeah? Yeah, I mean, and financial literacy isn't just reading oh, credit card debt tops one point three trillion and scrolling on.
It's knowing that if your APR is twenty four percent and you only make the minimum payment, that couch you bought basically turns into two couches that you're going to have to push together and pay for, Okay, And I think over time, Yeah, And I think one of my favorite callbacks was when we had ccon for student loans like forgiveness versus forbearans and just I mean, you don't owe anymore? Does it mean you just got a little
period where you don't have to pay? Like it's on pause right now, but it.
Might come back. Listen.
We're all not literate when it comes to that. It was very confusing. I was like, this is not an easy thing to understand, honestly.
And my science literacy didn't help, not at all.
I was like, I'm just as confused as you are. Please send your questions to CZ And I think.
You've really been bringing a lot of the policy angle over the past year, you know, with you being in public policy now and everything like civic literacy.
Mm hmmmm.
It's isn't just recognizing voter id or school choice as phrases. It's being able to read a new story about a new voter of law and answer whose life does this make easier or harder? What level of government is doing this? Is it the local government, the state government, the federal government? And where would I even show up if I wanted to fight it? It's understanding all of those things. You feel like you got too many potholes in your neighborhood,
Who do you go to? Do you know what elected representative you would need to send a letter to if you want to put in a stop sign on your corner, which I do. I sent a letter, very good. I sent a letter, Honey. I was like, we need to stop sign. These people are going through here, these speed humps not doing it. And then media literacy, which we talk about a lot on this show. Yes, you know, we talked about it with the parents, but it's happening
to us too now. You know you got to look and say, you know who made this, who is it for? Who gets paid? If it goes viral? And is this information or is it just an ad dressed up like information? Because advertisements Sometimes I'm reading stuff and I'm like, oh, this is a long pitch for me to.
Buy your workshop, you know, Oh my god.
But I think all of this is something we've recognized as an issue over time, and none of this, none of it is part of reading assessment.
No.
I think when people hear the word literacy, that's the first thing that comes to their mind. And that's not the full picture at all. If we want smarter societies, we don't need harder tests or to make people read longer form. We just need people who can understand complex information no matter the size. Yeah, you know, And so being able to read something, process it and have a takeaway from it. And so it's about understanding what you're consuming.
The good news is that if you don't like where you are right now, if you want to read, look in the mirror, say hey, neighbor, Turn to your left, turn to your right, and say hey, neighbor, if you want to read more. We you know, this is happening right before National Reading Month, which is in March. And if you're part of the ninety eight percent of adults that aren't reading to a kid. Please do go to the kids classroom and read a book.
They like it, they love it.
Oh my gosh, they lose their minds. I would encourage folks to just start reading things more often. It's not necessarily long form, but just you know, trying to take things in, even if it's just ten minutes a day. You know, I read Atomic Habits because I have a very big problem of trying to go straight from never doing a thing to like, now I'm going to read for.
An hour a day. And it's like, you don't have to do that. Actually, you can make tiny changes.
You can just say rip minutes a day and those changes repeated, ad up, Like you don't have to start reading War and Peace like you said by candlelight to feel the impacts. You know, let technology help you. Start with an app like the news app that's already on your iPhone. You can go in there and read news articles, or you can borrow an ebook on Libby. He's an app where you can borrow books from your local library and then just you know, start chipping away at it.
I think the change I want to see it's gotta start right here, and it's gotta start with our with our audience. I try to seeing people misread what the original poster said, even on social media, like just let's just make social media better with context, with two things being true, with anecdote versus statistical information, like large sets
of information. I just yes, honestly, And if you're choosing to get your information from a video, at least watch the whole video through, babe, because y'all be upset in the comments and I'm like, you.
Didn't watch the whole thing.
You clearly didn't. You're missing the point. And the point was ten seconds in. You watched the first five seconds and then got in the comments section angry. Calm down, yeah, and keep listening.
Yeah.
And I think this is anecdotal, so I can already say it in advance. There's a lot we can learn from gen Z. I'm tired of us piling on. Let's stop piling on. It's too much, it's too much. Leave them alone. They're just like any other generation. Every generation has their thing, and like they're no different from a baby boomer. You go back to the baby boomer time, baby Boomer's parents, what are they.
Gen uh whatever? It would be. Dust bowl hasn't ready.
No, I don't know. I don't know. It might be right.
Generation gold miners or whatever, I don't know. Uh, they their parents also believed that they were lazy, you know. And so it's just we all just got to understand that the context in which we are growing and developing in change is from generation to generation. Yeah, and we have to understand that everybody's just out here trying to make it and we're doing the best we can with.
What we got to say. Cut it out.
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Instagram at Dope Labs podcast. You can find me tt on X, Threads and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho, and you can find Zakiya at Ze said so. Dope Labs is a production of Lemonada Media. Our supervising producer is Keegan Zemma. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed by James Sparber. Lemonada's Senior Vice President of Content and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart Podcast is Katrina Norvil.
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Original music composed and produced by Taka Yasuzawa and Alex suki Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiah Wattley.