What Makes Reading Difficult for Students?

By Joyce Woodard

When 322 students were asked what their biggest college-reading concern was, the most selected answer for GAME was staying focused while reading, while understanding difficult texts was the most selected answer for FAME.

Given how much time students spend on devices, it’s no wonder they are concerned that they will become distracted or disinterested while reading for class. FAME students’ concern about not understanding difficult texts points to a different challenge. FAME students worry they won’t fully comprehend and interpret what they read; this difference highlights the different approaches students take to reading.

These findings show that students know the material they will be reading requires a different level of engagement and effort.

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

Where Zora Neale Hurston Gives Delia a Voice in “Sweat”

By Jade Harrison

 
Delia Jones speaks nearly 20% more than her husband, Sykes, when they are in her kitchen in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” (1926), revealing that a woman largely silenced elsewhere in the story gains a stronger voice in a distinct space.

Delia speaks 544 words to her Sykes’s 456, a difference of 88 words. The variation is striking because, across the story as a whole, Sykes actually speaks slightly more than Delia, 637 words to 622. Outside Delia’s kitchen, dialogue is dominated by men, including conversations of a group of men gathered on a porch.

In her kitchen, Delia stakes her claim to the entire house, telling Sykes, “Mah sweat is done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it.” On Joe Clarke’s porch, by contrast, Joe Lindsay describes her life as a washerwoman for the other men: “Hot or col’, rain or shine, je sez reg’lar ez de weeks roll roun’ Delia carries ‘em an’ fetches ‘em on Sat’day.”

Tracing where characters speak, not just what they say, reveals how Hurston uses setting to shape who gets heard, who gets silenced, and who holds power.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

The Majority Black Blocks in Edward P. Jones's Stories

By Kenton Rambsy

Edward P. Jones’s stories preserve a literary record of Black people and places in Washington, D.C., allowing readers to revisit neighborhoods that have changed dramatically over the last half century.

I matched the 403 DC places Jones names in his two story collections, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), to census records. The neighborhoods around those places lost their Black majorities faster than the city overall. In 1970, 70 percent of his places sat in majority Black neighborhoods, about the same as the 72 percent of DC neighborhoods that were majority Black. By 2020, only 20 percent of the neighborhoods around Jones’s places were majority Black, compared with 37 percent citywide.

Literary geotagging, that is, tracking the real places a writer names and connecting them to geographic data, helps reveal changes that are difficult to see from the stories alone. Jones makes this approach especially productive because his characters live on named streets, shop at named stores, and travel through identifiable neighborhoods. With my research assistants, the Data Rangers, I annotated these places and connected them to Open Data D.C. census records across several decades.

Half the settings in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” from Lost in the City fall on one block of Myrtle Street NE, a street the city closed in the 1960s. That neighborhood was 81 percent Black in 1950 and 18 percent Black in 2020.

In the title story, Lydia Walsh’s cab passes the Ridge Street block where her family lived. It was 95 percent Black around 1980, when the story is set, and 43 percent Black by 2020.

The census counts who left. Jones’s help us imagine and remember what life was like on those blocks.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

The Changing Black Neighborhoods of Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City

By Kenton Rambsy 

Edward P. Jones’s stories are situated in Washington, D.C., neighborhoods that were primarily Black during the periods he presents. By 2020, however, none of these four story locations constituted a majority-Black census neighborhood, which indicates the demographic transformation of the city over time.

Related: 

• Black Short Story Findings

Despite Digital Devices Young Women Students opt for Physical Media

By Albert Smith

Of 214 FAME respondents, 40% noted that their most used format when reading books are print books. Yet 79% of these young women reported that they anticipated primarily having to read on digital devices in college (smartphone, laptop, tablet, desktop computer).

This difference was particularly interesting as these readers prefer physical books, but they are mostly anticipating completing their academic related reading on digital devices. The results suggest that despite these students opting for physical media in their reading outside of class, they are ultimately expecting to engage mostly with digital media in college.

These findings offer insight into the habits of students reading on their own against what has been mapped for them in the classroom. Begging the question: How are higher education spaces adhering to the habits of their Black young women readers?

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

What’s so scary about Poetry?

By Kai Steward

When 214 FAME students were asked which aspect of college reading concerns them the most, 46 percent of students were concerned about being able to understand difficult texts.

What texts are the students most concerned about? Poems. They felt much more comfortable with short stories. The results suggest that because of a lack of exposure to poetry they feel underprepared for the genre.

The findings raise the question of why poetry, even though often a shorter genre, intimidates young readers. And how can we help them feel better prepared?

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

Why Students Prefer Short Stories

By Joyce Woodard

When 302 FAME AND GAME students were asked what they expected to be the most enjoyable readings of the semester, the majority answered short stories.

Is this preference among the FAME and GAME classes an indication of the shortened attention spans of Gen Z? On the contrary, when the same students were asked which readings they expected to enjoy the least, most answered poems.

Considering the fact that it usually takes longer to read a short story than a poem, the preference may have nothing to do with keeping students' attention. Perhaps the issue is how the details of the readings are presented; short stories are a bit more straightforward while poems require more interpretation. The way a story is told matters and ultimately determines how excited students will feel about reading for class.

Related: 

• Black Readers Findings

Poet William J. Harris Inspires Successful Visual Art Activity

My decades-long conversations with poet and literary scholar William J. Harris continue to pay dividends. This week offered one of the best examples.

 
Some years back, I discovered that when Professor Harris visits museums and art shows, he sketches what he sees in notebooks. He’s not a visual artist, but he enjoys tracking and tracing what catches his attention.

 
This week, I encouraged the 300 students enrolled in my African American literary Discovery Labs to follow Harris’s model. They perused art books featuring work by Kerry James Marshall, Amy Sherald, Kehinde Wiley, Jacob Lawrence, and others, and then spent time sketching.

 
To say it’s been a really good week based on their work would be an understatement. I had no idea so many of these students were such talented artists. Even more, I didn’t anticipate how seriously they would take the activity or how focused they would remain for extended periods.

 
We do our Discovery Lab activities in the Redmond Center, and because there are so many students, we have relatively short periods to meet. That’s usually not a problem, as students tend to complete the activity for the week and leave. This week, though, was different. More than with any previous activity, multiple students approached me and asked if they could stay longer to work on their drawings.