HARTFORD, Conn. -- In a world where students are averaging seven and a half hours a day on screens and attention spans are waning, Connecticut teachers say that students’ reading stamina and comprehension are declining.

That’s according to a recent Connecticut Education Association survey of 113 teachers. The majority of teachers surveyed are continuing to teach chapter books and must find more creative ways to reach students. The survey, conducted last month, found 54 teachers assigned four chapter books a year, 47 assigned three, seven did not assign any books, and three one book a year.

More than half of the teachers agreed that it is more difficult to get students to complete a chapter book than it was five years ago, with only 10 teachers disagreeing with the statement.

Kate Dias, president of the Connecticut Education Association, said on one hand, the survey results are encouraging because teachers have not given up on teaching books. But at the same time, she said, the struggles students are exhibiting with reading are troublesome.

“It was astounding without prompting the number of teachers that said, ‘I’m worried about stamina, the ability for these students to stick with this and do this on their own without being guided,’” Dias said. “That’s really the thing that they’re seeing and feeling the most that is alarming to them: That students don’t really feel the value of reading.”

Teachers said that reading is integral to students’ development but the over-reliance on technology and the emergence of artificial intelligence have negatively impacted students’ relationships with reading. They acknowledge that as technology continues to replace human functions, the challenge to motivate students to read grows.

“I think there’s deep concern for AI replacing things that we know kids need to experience to cognitively develop,” Dias said. “We cannot produce students that can read and understand if they don’t actually read. AI is a replacement of human capacity, and that’s a mistake.”

There is no single metric that fully captures a student’s literacy abilities. However, Connecticut students continue to improve slightly on English Language Arts assessments, with an average score of 65.0, compared to 64.7 last year, with the state’s target in every category at 75.

Teachers’ viewpoints on reading in the classroom

In open-ended responses to the reading survey, several teachers wrote about their challenges helping students navigate reading.

“Students’ imaginations seem to have gone elsewhere with 30-second TikToks and fast-moving video games,” one teacher wrote. “It’s almost impossible to hold their attention when we read more than short articles or stories. I’ve taken to making most of our in-class reading shorter and only using one or two novels per year.”

Another teacher wrote that students are “used to watching a 10-to-30-second clip on their YouTube or IG feeds, so sitting and sustaining even 10 minutes of reading is impossible for many of them, never mind getting through a 200-to-300-page novel.

“This is why we are starting to have students look at snippets of texts (fiction and nonfiction) for classroom readings and assessments,” the teacher wrote.

A third teacher expressed frustrations with students experiencing difficulties sustaining independent reading.

“Any books I assign in class I have to read to them as a whole group or they have to partner read,” the teacher said. “Their reading levels are extremely varied in my heterogeneous classes, and it is increasingly difficult to meet all students’ needs. This has gotten more and more difficult since I started teaching. It is disheartening to have students be frustrated or completely disinterested in reading.”

Another said that while phones have proven challenging, AI is “sealing the deal.

“It has become difficult to convince students that it matters to be able to think for oneself,” the teacher said.

Another teacher pointed to what they referred to as a weak reading culture among American teens and adults.

“Students lack the stamina to read longer texts, and they lack vocabulary to read complex texts,” the teacher wrote. “Combined, these cause students to give up and try to get by with Google or AI-generated summaries of what they read. It has gotten increasingly more challenging to find a way to get them to complete reading assignments outside of class as well.”

Another teacher expressed frustration with the current reading culture of students.

“In my 15+ years of teaching, students read less and less, parents exhibit and affirm a reading culture in school only, test scores plummet, and teachers are blamed,” the teacher wrote.

Some teachers wrote that they have seen an increase in interest in reading since COVID.

“My students love reading complete novels.,” the teacher wrote. “However, we read them together as a class. I separately assign independent reading books, but that is more difficult to ensure everyone is actually reading.”

One teacher wrote that students lack “perseverance in many contexts, but most notably in reading.”

Another wrote that their students “openly talk about never reading an entire book.

“They are lacking the reading stamina necessary to take in complex text of any length,” the teacher wrote. “And with AI, they feel they don’t have to.”

Another teacher referred to students as “functionally illiterate.

“They can read words on a page, but they have difficulty understanding the meaning of words together,” the teacher wrote.

A shift in reading

Meghan Hatch Geary, an English teacher at Woodland Regional High School, who has taught for nearly two decades, said she teaches full length texts to students.

She said students are facing more challenges with reading compared to when she began teaching years ago.

“Students are less inclined to apply tools on their own to really help them with their own reading skills,” she said. “So, there’s a lot more need for teacher explicit instructions on how to make sense of the text. So we have to be really strategic and creative and smart about how we design our lessons, how we design our activities and our assessments that encourage reading. Kids need a lot of help and we need to have the resources to help us serve them and meet their varying needs.”

She said technology has negatively impacted students’ learning.

“We thought we were doing the right thing, but we are now seeing that putting kids on screens, from phones to devices, has really had a detrimental impact on our kids’ ability to sustain their attention, to persevere through challenges and to think critically on their own, to read,” she said.

Dias said educators will continue to fight for the importance of reading in the classroom.

“I don’t believe that we as educators are going to subscribe to the age of reading being over,” Dias said. “I think that doesn’t acknowledge human curiosity. I think that one of the reasons we read is to develop our imagination, to develop our understanding, to have awareness, to be creative.”

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