[jagged-chisel]

Response looks cherry picked. I’d be curious to know the methodology here. I’ve seen intelligent students twisting in an attempt to satisfy the instructor that they (have been trained to) assume is trying to trick them with puzzles; the kind where “gotcha!” is the typical teaching method; where common sense is frowned upon.

[rahimnathwani]

IIRC the paper is behind a paywall. But this article has some good snippets from it:

https://open.substack.com/pub/nataliewexler/p/struggles-with...

[jagged-chisel]

In this specific case, I am left with questions: Why do these students need to read 19th century novels? And why do they need to understand the details of day-to-day life of over a century ago?

These are mostly rhetorical because my point is that you will not get the same answers from instructors, teachers, professors, parents …

If you want people, especially children, to read, it needs to be interesting to them. If you want them to learn by reading, they need to have had good experiences reading.

“Here, read some Dickens and we’ll discuss it next week …” without any amount of preparation by the teacher to a) help students understand the times within which it was written, and b) prepare them for the meandering prose is indeed a recipe for disaster.

Examples:

“as here he is” - so he's already doing what he ought? Or is there an alternate reading of this phrase meaning "he's physically here, but the situation is not as it ought to be"?

“… addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers…” - by the time we get here, is he saying the advocate is present, or that the advocate ought to be present but is not?

The sentence ran on, against the education we’ve been so wearily handed over the years. If we are not permitted to craft such things, how can we be expected to ever understand them?

The most productive way to invite a student to begin parsing this, in spite of their education, is to have someone - one who understands the passage, and can render the correct inflections and emphasis - read this to the class.

Barring that, if students are expected to parse, understand, and discuss prose and topics so many generations removed from their own lives, Education® needs to get off its butt and educate.

[rahimnathwani]

You're missing the point. They were given excerpts to read and, even with access to their phones to look up unfamiliar words, they were not able to understand what was written.

No one forced them to read full novels or even full pages.

No one expected them to know what 'Lord Chancellor' was. They could look it up.

"The most productive way to invite a student to begin parsing this, in spite of their education, is to have someone - one who understands the passage, and can render the correct inflections and emphasis - read this to the class."

The purpose of the study was to test reading comprehension. If you replace the 'reading' part with listening, you're not testing reading comprehension.