Hang tight while we fetch the video data and transcripts. This only takes a moment.
Connecting to YouTube player…
Fetching transcript data…
We’ll display the transcript, summary, and all view options as soon as everything loads.
Next steps
Loading transcript tools…
Using tech to raise better readers | Terms of Service | CNN | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Using tech to raise better readers | Terms of Service
Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.
Share:
Video Transcript
Video Summary
Summary
Core Theme
Declining literacy rates in the US are a complex issue exacerbated by technology and societal shifts, but can be addressed through intentional early childhood engagement, strategic use of digital media, and fostering a love for reading from a young age.
Mind Map
Click to expand
Click to explore the full interactive mind map • Zoom, pan, and navigate
Welcome back to Terms of Service. I'm CNN tech reporter Clare Duffy. We have all collectively
gotten a lot worse at reading. Even as a book lover myself, I know how distracting the pull of
our shiny little screens can be and the data about literacy rates for both adults and children is
troubling. To talk about why this is happening and what we can do about it, I have Susan Neuman here
in the studio with me today. She's a professor and department chair at NYU, a specialist in early
literacy development, and previously served as US assistant secretary for elementary and secondary
education where she established the early reading first program. Susan, thank you so much for being
here. It's nice to be here. So, you've worked in childhood literacy education for a long time. You
began your career as a first grade teacher. What in what ways have we seen the ways that we learn
to read change over that time? Well, I think the stakes are higher nowadays. In other words,
when I started school and and teaching, we would do a lot of play in kindergarten and first grade,
right? Um, you would send children to the various centers and they would play a good deal of the
day. Now, that's changed. Um, the stakes are higher. So, what we're seeing is that children
are expected to learn the skills associated with literacy earlier on, even in preschool.
So, we're talking about preschool, kindergarten, learning about skills when we used to learn about
play. Why is that? Like, is there research that says if you learn those reading skills earlier,
it's going to benefit you over your lifetime or do we just like to see kids playing less now? Why
is that? I think there's a sense that many of our children are not reading and if we begin earlier,
then we'll spark that early literacy right from the very beginning. Uh that's a falsehood to some
extent because what we know is places like Denmark and Finland, they'll start at third grade to learn
how to read and they'll be proficient by fourth grade. So in other words, starting early is not
necessarily the right thing to do, but we're the United States and we we often do that. Yeah. I was
actually recently in Denmark and I learned about like kids in kindergarten go to the forest on
Mondays because it's hard to come back to school. I'm like maybe that's what we should all do. Um,
right. So, in the US, more than half of adults read below a sixth grade level. That's right.
Reading levels among 12th graders have also recently dropped to 20-year lows. Why do
you think this is happening? Well, partially it's covid um and we're seeing the long-term
effects of covid. We see greater absentee rates in our schools like never before. So,
in some of the schools I work in, for example, there'll be 30% of the children are not in school.
which is extraordinary in terms of you know just learning about literacy. So that's one of the
reasons the long-term covid. I think there are other reasons though it is partially effect of
uh technology and other means of learning um that we at one time did not have and that will affect
how children are are learning generally. Yeah. How does that time that we spend on screens,
whether it's scrolling or switching between apps, affect how we read both as kids and adults? Well,
I'll tell you one thing that bothers me. It looks I have this opportunity and that is,
you know, I I use the subway all the time and I often see parents and children going to,
you know, school together and the parents are looking at their mobile device and are not even
interacting with their child. And what they'll do is instead of interacting with their child,
they'll give them a mobile device. And so the two of them will be looking independently at their
mobile device rather than interacting. And that is tragic because we know language development
occurs very very early on. And that conversation and that opportunity to interact is really missing
in many cases. Yeah. The subway is is such a good representation of the problem for all ages because
I feel like now rather than seeing people sitting and reading books on the subway, most people are
sitting looking at their phones, right? There is evidence suggesting that the amount of time that
we spend on our screens is affecting our attention span. Do you feel like that also plays a part here
in terms of just people's ability to sit down and focus on reading a book? I'm not sure. I think
that's an anecdote we often use. I'm not sure that that really is changing in terms of attention. So,
we do a fair amount of research with three and four year old children, believe it or not, looking
at eyetracking data and what we see is that their attention is quite good when there's something of
interest. And we often know that if children aren't interested, if they don't see things as
meaningful to them, they will not attend. So many of the kinds of apps that they have are, you know,
quick interactions and of course that's going to really not be very meaningful to them. But when
we have ebooks or when we have something that's a story book on an app, they'll pay attention.
Yeah. It's such a good example, too. I think even for adults like I myself, if I don't have a book
that I'm really invested in, I'm much more likely to go pull up Instagram and scroll. But if I have
something that I'm loving to read, then I go home and I'm excited to read it. That's right. You've
also done a lot of research into how we can use digital media to help people learn how to read.
Talk to me about that. What have you found? Well, one of the things that we know is that
good media is good media, whether it's in print or video. And what we're seeing is that children
do interact with video in a very positive way if it's an educational like resource. So for example,
when we compare the differences between children being read to and children watching the same
content on video, the attention is higher on video than it is in print. Now parents will not
want to hear that. But you might ask why that's the case. And I think it's based on the symbol
system of video and what it provides. So for example, for children who are learning new words,
there's often music and sound and it it gives a children an attentional focus that they otherwise
would not have. So when we compare the two, we see that video can have a really big effect on
children's vocabulary if it's good. The content must be good. Yeah. And those video programs
are kids seeing the words on the screen as they're being said or read in the same way that they would
see the words on a page. They're seeing it both ways. So, for example, we examined uh a wonderful
app called What's the Word? And it's silly. It's very, very short, but children learn the words
because the word is clearly said on the screen and it's repeated several times. And what we found
is even three and four year old children begin to identify those words because it's clearly defined,
repeated often and always in a meaningful setting. So that can make a difference.
Now there's other examples where there's print on screen and it's sort of like long print with lots
of words. Children will just ignore it completely and look at the pictures. So our eyetracking will
say that the pictures will say the meaning of the story rather than the words. Interesting.
In your research, you've also focused on how we can reduce knowledge gaps among early readers.
These are the gaps between kids who are exposed to more information and language and knowledge at
a young age and those who are less exposed. And I think people might have this impression that
technology exposes us to a a lot more information than before. But what have you found in terms of
how this knowledge gap has changed in the digital era? Unfortunately, it could change but it's not.
Um what we're seeing is tremendous gap between those children who live in poverty versus those
children who are have more resources and that's truly unfortunate and one of the things that we
know is that a lot of these children could benefit from crossplatform learning. So for
example when a child is interested in something a parent can read to the child but also give that
child opportunities going to the museum going to a live event having video experiences. So what
we're learning is that if we can engage children in their interests, you know, my grandchild for
example was fascinated with orca whales and what his father did very well as they read, they saw,
they went and all of those experiences really encourage a great deal of knowledge and that's
what parents really need to do. They re need to realize that uh interests really matter very early
on for children. That's so interesting, too, that it's it's about reading, but it's not just about
reading. It's also about sort of reinforcing what you've read and what you've learned with all of
those different ways of engaging with something, right? And how does that knowledge gap potentially
affect kids throughout their lives? Oh, it it's really disturbing. Building knowledge very early
on is very important because over time by fourth grade children are going to have to have a great
deal of background knowledge in order to actually read with comprehension. And so knowledge builds
knowledge. We know that if you have a little bit of knowledge, you get more knowledge. It's easier
to accumulate, right? So one of the things that we try to do is say work on foundational skills
early on but also help your child build knowledge and for young children what that means is having
someone to talk to in the joint attention. So that's why mobile devices are so problematic
because the parent will be staring at the mobile device and not the child. And you and I know
that eye to eye instruction is the way in which children learn. Yeah. Yeah. I think that could be,
you know, sort of a misconception like, oh, if I give my child an iPad or a phone, they
can find all of this information. But actually, I think your point about engaging with a parent,
um, is so important. What are some of the ways that we can potentially reduce these knowledge
gaps? Do you have sort of practical advice for parents? Well, one of the things that we know
is that AI can help in some ways. There's a good deal of information now about AI and a lot of fear
about AI. But one of the things that we've begun to understand is that AI can help us personalize
information and knowledge in a great positive way. So, we've been working primarily with teachers in
schools and we take a a difficult text and we can make it a little bit easier using AI for
children and then we can send that easier text home to the parent and have the child read with
the parent. So, in other words, we can do a lot of modifications and personalizations through AI
which we are still beginning to learn more about. That's so interesting too. Are you seeing just
sort of given the trends that we've seen about literacy rates among adults and kids, are you
are you seeing parents have a harder time teaching kids to read because they themselves have lower
literacy rates than maybe adults did in the past? Very very true. Uh so what we're seeing is that
parents who have low literacy rates are hesitant to read to their children and they're hesitant,
think of it, in a number of ways. I mean, they're embarrassed if they stumble over words. And I
often say to parents, remember the kid can't read. So if you make it up, they'll be okay as long as
you interact with them in in positive ways. But if they have low literacy, they don't see literacy as
something fun. Yeah. On your point about how AI and other technologies can actually potentially
help kids learn how to read, access to technology and digital media depends on where people are,
their economic status. Are there ways that we can better level the playing field here? I think we
can, of course. One of the things that I try to do is I try to teach teachers how to use it in a way
that really can support the children and learning in school and hope that that strategy can really
help them when they begin to talk to parents about how to modify instruction at home. I think even
making texts easier so that parents can read with greater fluency is really important because they
may then want to read to their children at home which would would be positive. I think that some
people might hear this and think well technology has contributed to this problem. So should we just
go back to trying to avoid using technology in order to help people learn how to read? What's
your response to that? No way. I think there's no way we're going to go back. So what we have to do
is we have to begin to really use the technology we have in very positive ways. So for example,
we see a very simple thing. We give children a reading text and sometimes the children don't want
to hear something in print. So we'll start with video and they love it, right? And then that video
has given them entree into the vocabulary into the story line. They're now interested in reading. So
one of the things I try to tell teachers is really use all the tools that we have and we can begin
to personalize instruction in better ways. I mean if you think of the average teacher in classroom,
she has 23 children, 23 different needs. And so how do we begin to do it? AI and and other video
can really help. How can parents create the best environment at home for kids to learn to read?
I think that one of the things that they can do is start a routine. Uh routines are a wonderful
thing. Children really react positively to a routine. So every night the bedtime routine
is just precious. And if a parent can't read to the child, then we say sing with the child
because that song is your voice and it's your history and it's your culture and they'll begin
to understand and and attach. Words are important because my mother loves me, my mother cares for
me. So that routine is so critically important. And always have a book with you. So when you go
to the doctor's office, you have a moment. Here's a book. use it in ways that are not just sort of
it's now time to sit down and read, but really as enjoyable moments. Yeah. What about for us adults?
Do you have advice about how we can all be better about reading more and being less distracted by
our devices? Oh, I wish I could. I wish I could. I wish I could say to adults, you have that child
for that one year, one year only, and it's so precious. and just put down that phone and just
look at your child and interact with them in ways that are really meaningful. Tell them the story
of their birth and how important that is in their lives and begin to connect in in better ways. What
I worry about, you know, we talk about literacy, but what I worry about is social interaction and
how children learn socially, pragmatics, um, you know, how are you? Well, I'm fine, thank you. Um
those are the kinds of interactions that children are missing with those mobile devices. Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the connection between social interaction and language
development and our ability to read. Right. Social interaction is the the basis. Literacy is a social
process. And what we know about young children is they become literate because they want to
socialize. They want to interact with people they care for mostly. That's their relatives, their
parents, their community. And that social process, we have to recognize that children mimic. And one
of the things that's so fun if you ever go into an early childhood class, they'll mimic their parents
or they mimic people they really um respect in some ways. And that is recognizing that literacy
is not just print. It's not just sitting down and reading. It's interacting with others, observing,
modeling what parents are doing or what caregivers are doing. And I know your specialty is in early
childhood education, but I wonder when we look at, you know, literacy rates among 12th graders,
for example. Do some of these pieces of advice hold true with older kids as well if parents
are trying to encourage their teenagers to read? I think I hate to say this, but I think it's hard by
12th grade. So, one of the reasons that I begin early on is I want to establish a habit. I want
children to understand that reading is important from the very beginning of their lives. When you
get to 12th grade, you've had years and years of frustration and you have years and years of
using other mechanisms to develop knowledge. It's very hard to begin at that particular point. So,
what I always say is you have to say what is something that really captivates you?
What do you want to learn more about? Well, if you want to learn something, you know, really indepth,
you have to read. What's the What's the best thing that you've read recently? Oh,
I'm reading it right now. You're not dead yet. Okay. I love it. Yeah. Awesome. Well,
Susan, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. Well, it's been fun.
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
