In an effort to test whether students pursuing English majors had noticeably higher reading comprehension skills compared to other majors, a group of psychologists developed a small group test that was applied to hundreds of colleges.
The study gave the English students one simple task: Read two chapters from a high school history book and summarize the content in class the next day. Though the 40 pages of scheduled, overnight reading material was a bit unorthodox, it was necessary in order to test the students’ comprehension and retention skills. As students of a major that is specifically designed around reading and comprehension, it was expected that most would have a high literacy rate with great comprehension and memory.
However, the results showed a very different and frankly discouraging conclusion. Of the thousands of students tested, only about 15 percent showed any understanding at all. In a class of 25 students, only four students, on average, were willing and able to contribute to the discussion. And, more often than not, the numbers were even lower.
After class, researchers consulted with the students in order to determine why they were unable to effectively communicate their thoughts on the assigned reading. The shocking fact of the matter proved to be that over 50 percent of the students did not actually read the text. Many excuses were given and have been laid out statistically for your viewing convenience.
Of the students, 23.4 percent said they could not find a pdf of the book online and thus could not read it. When questioned whether the book was not made available for them to purchase, most responded that they were too poor to purchase an $80 book, despite paying thousands of dollars in tuition to get an English degree.
8.1 percent said the pdf of the book didn’t cover the entirety of the reading selection, at most only giving excerpts from various chapters in the book. When questioned about the content of the excerpts, most responded that the content was simply too confusing to piece together, but that this was the fault of the lack of context for the excerpts and in no way a failing of their cognitive skills. Some responded that the content was too boring or that the text in the scanned image was too small. 6.8 percent claimed they forgot about the project entirely, often saying it was the fault of some intoxicant.
6.7 percent said they could not find where they needed to start because the pdf they found online lacked page numbers.
Five percent said the content was simply too confusing or too poorly written to be understandable. They felt that the main idea of the content was not presented early on and that the first chapter was so disorienting in its distribution of information that they could not retain anything at all by the end of it. When questioned on how they tried to overcome this problem, the students stated that they simply did not have enough time to reread the content over again. Though it should be noted that most of the student’s estimates regarding how much time it would have taken them to reread the content were highly exaggerated.
And what of the remaining 35 percent who claimed to have read the content but were incapable of commenting in the class? Nearly all of these students expressed social anxiety at the thought of speaking in class, and some explicitly stated they could simply never bring themselves to do it. Many respondents in this anxiety-riddled group did, however, state that they appreciated the more vocal students, because otherwise they would never have been able to understand the material.
The conductors of this study were thoroughly confused and far too floundered to draw a conclusion. What does it mean when so many students cannot read the assigned material? The psychologists involved found the only reasonable conclusion was that these students lack the capacity to read altogether. They are still looking into the obvious question of why so many illiterate students would choose an English major in the first place.