Maybe it’s just me, but my students seem to be reading less for their classes than they were even a few years ago. Beyond such personal musings and a lot of academic griping on this topic, there’s a dearth of recent empirical data on how much students actually read, but past studies suggest that students read approximately 30 percent of their assignments before class (Clump et al., 2004; Cressman, 2018). Faculty place much of the blame on generative AI, which can summarize readings easily. You can upload a PDF or even cut and paste a textbook chapter into a chatbot and receive the key points in seconds. Some blame also could rest with the pandemic, which significantly changed teaching and learning (Gurung & Plaza, 2024). Regardless of what actual levels of reading are and what’s to blame, all efforts to increase how much our students read is time well spent given how much reading can contribute to learning.
