2024 – “Professors say students are coming into college with a host of new and alarming learning challenges, including fragmented and distracted thinking, along with sharper limits on what they are willing or able to do.”

Sophia Sarafova, an associate professor of biology at Davidson College, notes that at the start of her teaching career, 18 years ago, new students were able to synthesize and summarize information from multiple lectures on a topic to extract general principles they could apply in new situations.

“Not anymore,” she says.

“Note-taking now requires specific instruction on what to write down and how to organize it. Also, a lot of students are unable to rephrase a statement without changing the meaning, often in drastic ways that clearly contradict the core of the statement.”

https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-the-end-of-reading