We live surrounded by stimuli. Our phones vibrate constantly, platforms compete for our attention, and for many young people (and not so young people), reading a full text seems like a feat.

As a university professor, I frequently observe that many students fail to fully understand what is being asked of them, not because of inability, but because they don’t read the instructions carefully. They often overlook key aspects of a statement, ignore explicit conditions, or submit incomplete assignments.

This pattern isn’t anecdotal: it’s repeated across all subjects in different grades and appears to be part of a generational trend. A recent example: a few weeks ago, I showed the famous invisible gorilla video in class, a classic psychology experiment . Although in the original studies only about 42% of participants spotted the gorilla, in my class, 90% saw it.

At first glance, this might be interpreted as an improvement in the ability to divide attention. However, qualitative observation suggests the opposite: most hadn’t listened well to the initial instructions (“Count the number of passes the white-shirted team makes to each other. You must remain attentive and take into account both aerial passes and bounce passes”).

Only the students who normally pay attention in class, and who didn’t see the gorilla, had followed the task objective. Once again, the problem isn’t just one of sustained attention, but of initial and conscious attention.

Superficial reading and cognitive dispersion

Numerous studies point to a loss of reading concentration among Generation Z, especially in academic settings. Experts observe that today’s students “read quickly, but not efficiently.” In-depth reading is hampered by multitasking, information fatigue , and a preference for short, visual, and multimodal content (text, video, music).

But it’s not just them. We’re all exposed to a fragmented information ecosystem today, where immediacy prevails over reflection. A 2015 internal Microsoft Canada report found that sustained attention span had dropped by 4 seconds (from 12 to 8). A later New York Times study with experts from Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Machine Interactions Lab found that people who are interrupted frequently give 20% more incorrect answers.

Do they read less or do they read differently?

Despite these data, it’s not true that young people don’t read. They simply read differently. A 2023 study by the Wattpad platform revealed that 67% of Gen Z members regularly read on their mobile devices and that they particularly value content with diverse representation. Furthermore, they consume more fiction in genres like fantasy, horror, and science fiction than previous generations.

Instead of dismissing these new formats, we must understand that reading habits have shifted toward digital, mobile, and interactive environments. The key isn’t judging what they read, but helping them recover the purpose with which they do so.

Relearning to read with intention

Academic and professional reading requires more than just decoding words: it requires interpreting, selecting, connecting, and inferring. These cognitive tasks require sustained attention, critical thinking, and emotional regulation.

Fortunately, there are effective strategies to help college students (and all of us) regain more attentive and in-depth reading, such as the following:

1. Teaching metacognitive strategies, such as active rereading, strategic underlining, and questioning while reading, has been shown to significantly improve reading comprehension.
2. Reading aloud or in groups, practiced in collaborative contexts, can promote concentration and critical interpretation of the text .
3. Promoting slow and deliberate reading, a practice that encourages students to slow down to explore meaning, can counteract the skimming habits developed in digital environments. In the classroom, this can take the form of guided reading sessions, reflective annotation, or exercises comparing sources with different levels of depth.
4. It is also useful to train in identifying the author’s voice , analyzing the discursive genre, or understanding the argumentative structure, tasks that reinforce strategic competence, which is key to deep understanding.

Reading is, after all, a complex cultural and mental practice that must be explicitly taught, not just assumed as something acquired.

Reading is understanding and deciding

In an environment of constant overstimulation, reading well is not a guaranteed skill. It’s a competency that must be trained, nurtured, and revalued. If we don’t teach Generation Z to develop active reading strategies, we run the risk of training professionals who don’t fully understand what’s being asked of them, who make decisions without understanding the facts, or who can’t distinguish a reliable source from a misleading headline.

Reading education isn’t limited to teaching how to read books: it’s teaching how to read instructions, contracts, emails, technical documents, political speeches, and screens. It’s teaching how to pause, interpret, and think.

And that, today more than ever, is urgent.

Author Bio: Nélida Dávila Espuela is Professor of Communication and Marketin at the European University