6 ms·

The enemy of reading nowadays is not phonics alternatives, it is the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't mov

The enemy of reading nowadays is not phonics alternatives, it is the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.

sixtyj 1y ago
This. People skim, they don’t read. Back in the 90's when they were looking for a killer app for browsers, who knew that video would be the real killer app (of the brain and attention).
jihadjihad 1y ago
I think it's counterproductive to provide Chromebooks and iPads to students, but the "excessive use of screens" in my experience is by and large a parenting issue. And it's not just about boundaries around devices, like time limits or app restrictions. It's about setting the right example and providing an environment where reading a book is as stimulating and desirable and encouraged as playing a game every once in a while on an iPad. It's telling that the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children. And children cannot be held accountable for poor habits that are largely a consequence of their environment.
- coliveira 1y ago
  > the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children You're right, and we see this everywhere. But at least adults already learned how to read, so this is not something that will stop their development during their critical formative years.
  - ocschwar 1y ago
    It's true, but it's cold comfort. the amount of reading I can do in a single sitting has declined a lot.
- aeternum 1y ago
  The screens thing is a diversion. The core issue is that it's nearly illegal to discipline students now. There's a socioeconomic divide because child behavior is unfortunately negatively correlated to socioeconomics. Thus poor schools suffer more from the lack of ability for teachers to remove disruptive students. Yes some excellent teachers are sometimes able to deal with it, most cannot.
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    I think the drop is an almost worldwide thing and not correlated very much to disciplining. Disciplining varies, the screens and the slop are universal.
    - cudgy 1y ago
      This is an interesting take. Based on what you’re saying, then I presume that in India and China academic performance is dropping as well?
      - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
        According to PISA results, it seems that the US does worse on maths on average, but pretty close on reading relative to UK and Ireland. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor... There's probably a much better data source, but am on phone.
        cudgy 1y ago
        For the purposes of determining the effect of screen time on education, we would need to compare the performance of Chinese or Indian students over time along with a measurable increase of the use of screens and compare that to say American students. Simply comparing American students to Chinese or Indian students is not sufficient.
        1y ago
noosphr 1y ago
I've got a zfold and it's the best ebook reader I've ever had. Currently have 500 papers and 30 books on it. Being able to screen read anything is also a plus for light reading like war and peace.
- pixl97 1y ago
  I mean I'm sure you disable most pop-ups and notifications on your phone too. The problem is most people don't and every type of distraction is vying for their attention every moment they are on that screen.
renewiltord 1y ago
That can't be true because the Mentava and Alpha School kids use screens for instruction and they're doing well from parental reports.
- cudgy 1y ago
  You would have to compare it to a cohort using no screens to know whether there was a benefit or loss.
  - renewiltord 1y ago
    If the effect size is large (ie the screens are substantially damaging) we’d expect to simply directly observe something but these kids test near the top. You only need that kind of comparison if the effect is not acute.
    - cudgy 1y ago
      Not sure what you’re saying here. I think you’re saying you can just observe the top performers and measure whether the top performers use screen time frequently outside of school. Not sure this works as it’s probable that the top performers are gonna be the same in both situations. However, my concern was with the use of screens IN schools as part of the curriculum and as a replacement of textbooks and other sources.
      - renewiltord 1y ago
        Alpha School students learn their lessons almost exclusively from a screen during the intensive 3 h first section of day. If screens were debilitating these children would not show high percentile MAP scores. The children do. Therefore screens cannot be debilitating. At worst they can have a negative long term effect or a mild deleterious effect. But they do not have an acute deleterious effect.
        cudgy 1y ago
        OK, but would these children have done better without using the screens? That is the question not whether students can possibly do well with screens. For example, what if the students at the top are less impacted by using screens and would’ve done just as well with books. And at the same time, some of the students in the middle would’ve done better when using books. The analysis you suggest would not catch that.
nostrademons 1y ago
Is it actually? That's a very common bugaboo, but I'm not convinced that screen time use is really the main culprit, and I think it's self-evident that it won't have as big an effect as not knowing how to read. The article seemed to suggest as much as well: > But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses. My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits. Most of their friends have similar arrangements. It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. When you're limited to an hour of screen time a day, there's still 23 hours to do other stuff.
- jihadjihad 1y ago
  > It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. A confounding variable is how reading enjoyment is built and sustained across achievement levels. Presumably your kids and their friends are already high achievers, and as you said, nothing is stopping them from enjoying reading. I think that is great, and again, presumably in these households reading is encouraged as a fulfilling pastime. The question is to what degree lower performers both come to enjoy and choose to engage in reading. If a household doesn't often engage in reading, or it isn't encouraged, or there is little parental support for a laggard reader, it stands to reason that "those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses."
  - nostrademons 1y ago
    Yes. It's usually more fun to do things that you're good at. Reading and academic performance generally has a snowball effect: if you're good at it, you want to do it more, which makes you even better at it, and so on. My point is that if you're looking for an ultimate cause for why this snowball never gets started, I'd look at the very beginning, when kids don't learn the fundamentals needed to make that first leap into reading. Without phonics they don't have the tools needed to sound out unfamiliar words, without this, they really are just guessing all through the rest of their education. And without competence, reading isn't fun, so why would they do it for fun? I'd actually go further and say that the causality between screen time and lack of reading goes the other way. The reason that today's social media industry looks the way it does, with lots of short videos, is because its primary audience can't read. There were plenty of text-based social media sites that catered to Millennials in the early 00s; one is literally named "Reddit". But images and videos started dominating around 2013 because the kids entering prime social media demographics couldn't read. It's a case of the market pulling the product out: text based social media is a niche product today, with Instagram dominating over Facebook, YouTube over Google+, and Reddit and Twitter/X moving to videos, because its primary market can't deal with text.
qqtt 1y ago
I would argue the problem is multi-faceted, and screens are a convenient boogeyman which is a relatively easy thing to point to. The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less time. Children are given devices to play with because the parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully engage with young children that are full of energy. Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply left behind as an afterthought in public budgets. So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality education time with their parents being funneled into underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40 kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty training in grade school. As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is something worth investing in and we need to spend the time, money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better. Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.
- rpcope1 1y ago
  I mean the thing with parents both needing likely stressful jobs just to make ends meet doesn't just stop at education, it also impacts fertility. We won't even have kids to educate if something doesn't change. It shouldn't require two people working full time to be able to afford a home and have kids, and we need to push against the various forces that have driven us to that.
- cudgy 1y ago
  First, salaries for teachers must be compensated for the fact that teachers get three months off for summer amongst many other holidays that other workers do not get. Also, teachers get regular salary increases and have generous pension plans. I know several teachers personally that retired after working for 30 years and now have pensions paying 75% of their last highest salary for the rest of their lives, including survivor benefits. Second. Screen Time causes many issues in schools. Not the least of which is the distraction they causes children in the classroom and between classes. Another issue with screens and schools is the cost of these screens and these Chromebook and all the IT and infrastructure that’s required in order to basically just read some material. Prior to chrome books you simply had books and the books lasted for decades, potentially with no further expenses required. The whole educational system is an absolute mess with tons of waste and inefficient processes. Adding technology in Chromebook on top of it all was not helpful.

The enemy of reading nowadays is not phonics alternatives, it is the excessive use of screens that kills focus and the desire to learn anything that doesn't move.

sixtyj 1y ago

This. People skim, they don’t read. Back in the 90's when they were looking for a killer app for browsers, who knew that video would be the real killer app (of the brain and attention).

jihadjihad 1y ago

I think it's counterproductive to provide Chromebooks and iPads to students, but the "excessive use of screens" in my experience is by and large a parenting issue. And it's not just about boundaries around devices, like time limits or app restrictions. It's about setting the right example and providing an environment where reading a book is as stimulating and desirable and encouraged as playing a game every once in a while on an iPad. It's telling that the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children. And children cannot be held accountable for poor habits that are largely a consequence of their environment.

coliveira 1y ago
> the second part of your sentence applies equally well to adults as children You're right, and we see this everywhere. But at least adults already learned how to read, so this is not something that will stop their development during their critical formative years.
- ocschwar 1y ago
  It's true, but it's cold comfort. the amount of reading I can do in a single sitting has declined a lot.
aeternum 1y ago
The screens thing is a diversion. The core issue is that it's nearly illegal to discipline students now. There's a socioeconomic divide because child behavior is unfortunately negatively correlated to socioeconomics. Thus poor schools suffer more from the lack of ability for teachers to remove disruptive students. Yes some excellent teachers are sometimes able to deal with it, most cannot.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  I think the drop is an almost worldwide thing and not correlated very much to disciplining. Disciplining varies, the screens and the slop are universal.
  - cudgy 1y ago
    This is an interesting take. Based on what you’re saying, then I presume that in India and China academic performance is dropping as well?
    - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
      According to PISA results, it seems that the US does worse on maths on average, but pretty close on reading relative to UK and Ireland. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor... There's probably a much better data source, but am on phone.
      - cudgy 1y ago
        For the purposes of determining the effect of screen time on education, we would need to compare the performance of Chinese or Indian students over time along with a measurable increase of the use of screens and compare that to say American students. Simply comparing American students to Chinese or Indian students is not sufficient.
        1y ago

noosphr 1y ago

I've got a zfold and it's the best ebook reader I've ever had. Currently have 500 papers and 30 books on it. Being able to screen read anything is also a plus for light reading like war and peace.

pixl97 1y ago
I mean I'm sure you disable most pop-ups and notifications on your phone too. The problem is most people don't and every type of distraction is vying for their attention every moment they are on that screen.

renewiltord 1y ago

That can't be true because the Mentava and Alpha School kids use screens for instruction and they're doing well from parental reports.

cudgy 1y ago
You would have to compare it to a cohort using no screens to know whether there was a benefit or loss.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  If the effect size is large (ie the screens are substantially damaging) we’d expect to simply directly observe something but these kids test near the top. You only need that kind of comparison if the effect is not acute.
  - cudgy 1y ago
    Not sure what you’re saying here. I think you’re saying you can just observe the top performers and measure whether the top performers use screen time frequently outside of school. Not sure this works as it’s probable that the top performers are gonna be the same in both situations. However, my concern was with the use of screens IN schools as part of the curriculum and as a replacement of textbooks and other sources.
    - renewiltord 1y ago
      Alpha School students learn their lessons almost exclusively from a screen during the intensive 3 h first section of day. If screens were debilitating these children would not show high percentile MAP scores. The children do. Therefore screens cannot be debilitating. At worst they can have a negative long term effect or a mild deleterious effect. But they do not have an acute deleterious effect.
      - cudgy 1y ago
        OK, but would these children have done better without using the screens? That is the question not whether students can possibly do well with screens. For example, what if the students at the top are less impacted by using screens and would’ve done just as well with books. And at the same time, some of the students in the middle would’ve done better when using books. The analysis you suggest would not catch that.

nostrademons 1y ago

Is it actually? That's a very common bugaboo, but I'm not convinced that screen time use is really the main culprit, and I think it's self-evident that it won't have as big an effect as not knowing how to read. The article seemed to suggest as much as well: > But the smartphone thesis has a few weak spots. It’s not just middle schoolers and high schoolers whose performance is declining; it’s also kids in elementary school. Phone use has certainly increased among young children, but not to the ubiquitous proportions of adolescents. And even though smartphone use is almost universal, the learning losses have not been. High-achieving kids are doing roughly as well as they always have, while those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses. My kids are allowed to have screen time, but with limits. Most of their friends have similar arrangements. It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. When you're limited to an hour of screen time a day, there's still 23 hours to do other stuff.

jihadjihad 1y ago
> It doesn't seem to stop them from enjoying reading. A confounding variable is how reading enjoyment is built and sustained across achievement levels. Presumably your kids and their friends are already high achievers, and as you said, nothing is stopping them from enjoying reading. I think that is great, and again, presumably in these households reading is encouraged as a fulfilling pastime. The question is to what degree lower performers both come to enjoy and choose to engage in reading. If a household doesn't often engage in reading, or it isn't encouraged, or there is little parental support for a laggard reader, it stands to reason that "those at the bottom are seeing rapid losses."
- nostrademons 1y ago
  Yes. It's usually more fun to do things that you're good at. Reading and academic performance generally has a snowball effect: if you're good at it, you want to do it more, which makes you even better at it, and so on. My point is that if you're looking for an ultimate cause for why this snowball never gets started, I'd look at the very beginning, when kids don't learn the fundamentals needed to make that first leap into reading. Without phonics they don't have the tools needed to sound out unfamiliar words, without this, they really are just guessing all through the rest of their education. And without competence, reading isn't fun, so why would they do it for fun? I'd actually go further and say that the causality between screen time and lack of reading goes the other way. The reason that today's social media industry looks the way it does, with lots of short videos, is because its primary audience can't read. There were plenty of text-based social media sites that catered to Millennials in the early 00s; one is literally named "Reddit". But images and videos started dominating around 2013 because the kids entering prime social media demographics couldn't read. It's a case of the market pulling the product out: text based social media is a niche product today, with Instagram dominating over Facebook, YouTube over Google+, and Reddit and Twitter/X moving to videos, because its primary market can't deal with text.

qqtt 1y ago

I would argue the problem is multi-faceted, and screens are a convenient boogeyman which is a relatively easy thing to point to. The harder problems are that both parents need jobs to make ends meet, meaning actual time with their children are both lower quality and less impactful due to lower energy and less time. Children are given devices to play with because the parents are exhausted and don't have the energy to fully engage with young children that are full of energy. Education itself is also chronically underfunded, especially teacher salaries. Whereas before teacher salaries would pay something resembling a living wage, these days the cost of living has exploded and teachers are generally just simply left behind as an afterthought in public budgets. So you have cohort after cohort of children with less quality education time with their parents being funneled into underpaid teachers who are expected to teach a class of 20-40 kids how to read, with poor support systems in place for everything from kids with behavior issues to even potty training in grade school. As a society, we aren't valuing education - neither from the home side, to the workplace accommodation side, to the actual classroom. Until we all collectively agree that this is something worth investing in and we need to spend the time, money and energy to do it correctly, it won't get better. Screens are a symptom but taking them away completely is just treating the symptoms instead of the underlying disease.

rpcope1 1y ago
I mean the thing with parents both needing likely stressful jobs just to make ends meet doesn't just stop at education, it also impacts fertility. We won't even have kids to educate if something doesn't change. It shouldn't require two people working full time to be able to afford a home and have kids, and we need to push against the various forces that have driven us to that.
cudgy 1y ago
First, salaries for teachers must be compensated for the fact that teachers get three months off for summer amongst many other holidays that other workers do not get. Also, teachers get regular salary increases and have generous pension plans. I know several teachers personally that retired after working for 30 years and now have pensions paying 75% of their last highest salary for the rest of their lives, including survivor benefits. Second. Screen Time causes many issues in schools. Not the least of which is the distraction they causes children in the classroom and between classes. Another issue with screens and schools is the cost of these screens and these Chromebook and all the IT and infrastructure that’s required in order to basically just read some material. Prior to chrome books you simply had books and the books lasted for decades, potentially with no further expenses required. The whole educational system is an absolute mess with tons of waste and inefficient processes. Adding technology in Chromebook on top of it all was not helpful.