Max. Classroom Capacity: Keep Reading

Dear readers,

I recently dug up a book that first captured my attention when I was defending my dissertation in 2005: Intelligence in Nature by the anthropologist Jeremy Narby. In it, Narby relays lessons learned from native Amazonian shamans and empirical studies in biology about intelligence in animals and plants. It’s an interesting read for a number of reasons, with brilliant descriptions of nonhuman intelligent behavior, such as bees learning abstract symbols, macaws eating specific clays to neutralize toxins in their diets, and parasitic dodder plants selectively choosing the most nutrient-dense hosts. It was just the thing to stop me from ruminating about my dissertation!

Narby also contemplates the idea that scientists’ resistance to “anthropomorphizing” their subjects has impeded their ability to recognize intelligence in other forms of life. He argues that this instinct by scientists is more about preserving our belief that humans are above or separate from nature than it is to preserve scientific objectivity. He presents, in contrast, Amazonian shamans’ beliefs that all living things have spirits with which one can commune using psychoactive drugs such as ayahuasca as a means of better understanding them. He cites shamans’ profound knowledge of medicinal plants as evidence of the effectiveness of their approach—given the tens of thousands of plant species in the Amazon and hundreds of maladies (or more?) to be treated, the odds of people discovering medicinal uses for specific plants on specific illnesses through trial and error, even over thousands of years, is quite low.

I recall enthusiastically sharing this book with my colleagues as a newly minted assistant professor in my first year out of grad school. This was probably a poor decision on my part as it seemed to me, based on their reactions, that many of my new colleagues were wondering why I was reading this book rather than one more germane to the work of a budding researcher in I-O psychology. Moreover, it felt like my interest in the ideas espoused in this book was a sort of “black mark” that revealed a lack of necessary skepticism or adherence to scientific standards. I recall conversations with several colleagues in which I described some of the interesting findings (e.g., slime molds efficiently navigating simple mazes despite being a collection of single-celled organisms). Their reaction was to immediately dismiss the findings as pseudoscience or anthropomorphizing, without having read the book or asking about the kind of methodological details needed to properly evaluate research.1

On the one hand, I was puzzled by this reflexive dismissal of unconventional ideas, especially of findings from fields other than our own. I find such ideas exciting and stimulating—and although I wasn’t convinced by many of them, I felt comfortable withholding judgment as a nonexpert. On the other hand, I deeply understand this reaction. Like many of you, scientific skepticism was fundamental to my training as a psychological scientist. I think reflexive skepticism is especially strongly developed in the field of psychology, where historically we have had to fight against the perception that our work is pseudoscientific, consists of interesting but unfalsifiable theories, provides no added value over “common sense,” or is “soft science” that lacks the rigor of traditional “hard sciences,” such as physics or chemistry. As a result, maybe we overcompensate by fetishizing analytical sophistication and theoretical complexity at the expense of practical applicability or accessibility.

Having read 500+ words of this column, you may be saying to yourself, “My Classroom Capacity is still waiting to be Maxed.” Let me get closer to the point: Keep reading.

The fact that you are reading TIP means you likely agree with me. You are probably an avid reader. Perhaps you read both in your professional capacity and for pleasure. Most of you have pursued (or are pursuing) graduate-level education that requires intensive reading. If you are a teacher, you almost certainly have assigned readings in your classes. However, instructors may be facing a landscape in which students are less inclined or able to read. We may increasingly feel pressure to assign fewer readings, or easier readings, in the years to come compared to before.

Much has been written about the ongoing decline or even death of reading in the USA. Horowitch’s (2026) popular press article proclaims that “The End of Reading is Here.” The basic thesis of the piece is that our shift toward digital technologies, such as smartphones and social media, has reduced our attention spans and interest in consuming complex, longform writing. As a lover of books and someone who believes in the importance of reading to obtain an education, I found this notion very alarming. However, that reflective scientific skepticism also kicked in—isn’t reading at least as important, enjoyable, and popular now as it was in decades past?

What would the death of reading even look like? Would fewer people learn to read, preferring to consume information in audio or video form,2 until reading becomes a niche pastime among a small minority, like knitting or updating your MySpace profile? Or would reading skills deteriorate until most people are only able to process short, simple written content like what appears on Twitter/X? Another question relevant to us as teachers: Are younger generations to blame, or is this happening to everyone all at once? I looked into some of the relevant research. Important caveat—this is not an exhaustive review, and I am not a literacy or media researcher.

First, are fewer people reading? In a longitudinal analysis of the American Time Use Survey, Bone et al. (2025) found a negative trend in the number of people who read for pleasure over the last 20 years. One might assume that this was due to younger people reading less. However, the trend appeared strongest in adults over 65, and was absent among those aged 15–24, the category in which most typical college students fall.

Similarly, the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts shows that in 2022, only 48.5% of adults had read a book of some kind that year compared to 52.7% in 2017 (National Endowment for the Arts, 2023). However, this difference was absent from the 18–24 age category (47.4% vs 47.3%)3—indeed, the difference was observed only in individuals 45 and older.

From these data, it appears that, indeed, fewer people are reading now than before. However, this trend appears to be driven mostly by older adults rather than college-aged individuals who read books and read for pleasure as much today as a decade ago.

Second, are reading skills deteriorating? A common complaint from faculty who have been teaching for a while is that the quality of student writing has declined, perhaps due to the rise of text messaging and social media sites like Twitter/X, which encourage brevity over quality. Maybe digital technologies are also degrading students’ ability to read longer, more complex sources, such as books and journal articles? Or is reading just something that we have always complained about in some form or another? For example, Aldous Huxley complained that people engage in too much superficial and inattentive reading in a Vanity Fair article in 1930.4

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2024) assessed adult literacy skills in its Survey of *989-Adult Skills 2023. Their results show that overall, adults (ages 16–65) in the USA scored lower in literacy (259.3 points) in 2023 than they did in 2012 (271.7 points, a difference of -12.4 points, or -10.4 when controlling for changes in demographics). This decrease was observed across all age categories. Interestingly, whereas some countries showed even larger decreases in literacy (e.g., Poland, Lithuania, S. Korea), others showed either negligible change (e.g., Spain, Chile, Canada) or increases in literacy. In particular, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark—all four participating Nordic countries—showed 10+ point increases in literacy, controlling for demographics changes. It may or may not be a coincidence that these Nordic countries have all either moved to reduce cellphone use in classrooms, shifted away from screen-based instruction, and/or shifted more toward printed books and handwriting in school.

Digging into data from educational research, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an organization that has monitored student performance in reading and math since the 1970s, found that 12^th-graders’ average reading scores significantly decreased from 2019 to 2024. Interestingly, there were no differences among readers above the 90^th percentile, and the largest difference was among readers in the 10^th percentile. This downward trend in reading scores has been happening since at least as far back as 1992. Do these data mean that college students are worse readers now than before? About 62% of high schoolers attend college (National Center for Education Statistics, 2024), but those who do are likely to be relatively high-performing readers (i.e., closer to the 90^th percentile than the 10^th). So, literacy overall is going down, but it’s not clear how much this applies to college students, specifically. Nonetheless, this suggests that instructors may have already faced, and may continue to face, a student body that is less proficient at reading.

Can we attribute decreases in literacy to the ubiquity of smartphones and other digital devices? Hakemulder and Mangen (2024) investigated whether screen time impacts literary reading behavior. They describe the shallowing hypothesis: “increased screen reading leads to a propensity to skim and scan rather than carefully read, since digital reading material is typically composed of short, decontextualized snippets of multimedia content rather than long, linear, texts” (p. 57). Across three experiments, they found a pattern in which more frequent reading of short texts on screen was associated with less willingness to invest cognitive resources necessary to deeply process literary text. For example, in their Study 1, participants were randomly assigned to read a story either on screen or on paper. Participants who read the story on screen processed it more superficially (e.g., they found it less meaningful) compared to those who read the story on paper. Hakemulder and Mangen also found that, independent of the medium manipulation, individuals who self-reported regularly reading books were better able to deeply process literary text.

Taken together, these findings suggest that college students may be somewhat less able to read today compared to 10 years ago, but they read as many books and read as much for pleasure as in the past, and yet, exposure to reading materials in digital form undermines their ability to deeply process the materials. I’m not sure this equates to the “death of reading” among college students, but let’s think about how this might impact how we design and teach classes. First, how much reading should we assign in class? As noted, there may be a temptation to assign fewer readings because of an expectation that many students will not read them deeply enough or at all. Now students can also use AI to summarize readings for them. Do we reduce the amount of reading or the difficulty of reading to accommodate students’ (presumed) lower reading ability? The second concerns how we as instructors prepare for and teach our classes. These data suggest that older Americans, although more literate than younger Americans, are most at risk of reading less. Does this apply to I-O psychologists, too?

I don’t have clear answers to these questions, and certainly you will come up with your own anyway, but here are some suggestions that I think are supported by the data presented:

1. Prohibit use of digital devices in the classroom. For example, at the beginning of every class, I ask students to put their cell phones away and out of sight. I also have a “no laptops” policy, although I do make exceptions when a laptop is necessary to complete required in-class groupwork. Some students grumble a bit at first, but I find these policies benefit attentiveness. By the way, there is now broad empirical evidence showing that using electronic devices such as laptops and cell phones in the classroom undermines student learning via creating a distraction (e.g., Carter et al., 2017; Fried, 2008; Ravizza et al., 2017) and via different encoding processes involved in typed versus handwritten notes (e.g., Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014).
2. I will admit that this suggestion may be a stretch, but it follows from Hakemulder and Mangen’s (2024) findings: Continue to assign readings that are appropriate to your course, but consider collating the readings into a printed course pack. The more you can encourage students to read hard copy (versus digital media), the better they will learn what you assign them. A printed course pack also makes it a little bit harder for students to have AI summarize the readings for them. I don’t love advocating for more hard copy from an environmental sustainability standpoint, but it becomes less problematic if the course packs are reused rather than printed anew each semester.
3. Important: You should keep reading, too! As noted earlier, declines in reading seem to happen as you get older. Most of you already have good reading habits (e.g., you read a hard copy book at night instead of reading on your phone). One realization I had after rereading Narby’s book on animal intelligence is that, for me, that book hit the sweet spot of both being in the category of reading for pleasure as well as being intellectually stimulating enough to inspire me professionally as well. I have found that developing intellectual interests outside of the relatively narrow scope of my research helps me to be more creative in my approach to both research and teaching.

As always, please email me with your thoughts, critiques, ideas, or to just say hi: Loren.Naidoo@csun.edu

Notes

1 I also had some really great conversations with other colleagues about how the ideas in the book jive with (or don’t) how we have conceptualized and measured intelligence in psychology.

2 Or maybe a Matrix-style direct-to-brain information transfer technology will be invented that renders text, audio, and video obsolete. Numbers flicker across the screen, our hero sighs, opens his eyes and says, “I know IRT.” 

3 There was, however, a significant reduction in the amount of poetry read by 18–24-year-olds in 2022 (9%) compared to 2017 (17.5%). “O for the touch of a vanished hand, / And the sound of a voice that is still!” (Tennyson, 1842/2006, p. 1152).

4 Interestingly, Huxley proposed implementing a modest global tax of four or five thousand percent on paper to reduce the number of magazines and newspapers and encourage the “thorough and intensive reading of good books.” Ironic that he proposed this idea in a magazine article.

References

Bone, J. K., Bu, F., Sonke, J. K., & Fancourt, D. (2025). The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey. iScience, 28(9), 113288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113288

Carter, S. P., Greenberg, K., & Walker, M. S. (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review, 56, 118–132.

Fried, C. B. (2008). In-class laptop use and its effects on student learning. Computers & Education, 50, 906–914.

Hakemulder, F., & Mangen, A. (2024). Literary reading on paper and screens: Associations between reading habits and preferences and experiencing meaningfulness. Reading Research Quarterly, 59(1), 57–78. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.527

Horowitch, R. (2026, August). The end of reading is here. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/

Mueller, P. A. & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159–1168.

Narby, J. (2005). Intelligence in nature: An inquiry into knowledge. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2024). Immediate college enrollment rate. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cpa.

National Endowment for the Arts. (2023). Arts participation patterns in 2022: Highlights from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. U.S. Government. www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/2022-SPPA-final.pdf.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]. (2024). Do adults have the skills they need to thrive in a changing world? Survey of Adult Skills 2023. OECD Publishing.

Ravizza, S. M., Uitvlugt, M. G., & Fenn, K. M. (2017). Logged in and zoned out: How laptop internet use relates to classroom learning. Psychological Science, 28(2), 171–180.

Tennyson, A. (2006). Break, break, break. In S. Greenblatt (Ed.), The Norton anthology of English literature (8th ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1152–1153). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1842)