07/29/2018
Fake News!
I ran across this meme yesterday. It represents a common fallacy about the state of our college students. As a postsecondary reading professional, let me set the record straight with this quote from a white paper commissioned by the College Reading and Learning Association in 2013. A percentage of America's college students have always needed support with reading. And there has almost always been help provided to them by their schools.
"Over 100 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century, in assessing college students’ literacy proficiencies Copeland and Rideout (1901) complained that “at one extreme of this class of Freshmen are the illiterate and inarticulate, who cannot distinguish a sentence from a phrase, or spell the simplest words” (p. 2) and that “so few of them have been brought up to read anything at all, or would now start to read of their own accord, that an acquaintance with a few books must be forced upon them” (p. 63). Triggs (1941) wrote four decades later that “research has established beyond a doubt that students entering college vary greatly in reading proficiency” (p. 371) and in the middle of the 20th century Barbe (1952) estimated that “twenty percent of entering college students read less efficiently than did the average eighth-grade pupil” (p. 229). These complaints—some dating back more than a century— provide some context to fears that the need for college developmental reading is a recent, unprecedented need."
from The Terrain of Developmental Reading written by Jodi Patrick Holschuh and Eric J. Paulson.
http://crla.net/images/whitepaper/TheTerrainofCollege91913.pdf