September 18, 2023

333. The Science of Reading feat. Adrian Johns

56 minutes

In the information economy, reading is an essential skill. How can competency in reading be measured, and how can it be improved? In the 19th century, there emerged a science of reading that led to the “reading wars” that are with us to this day.

Adrian Johns is the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History at the University of Chicago and also an author. His latest book is titled The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America.

Adrian and Greg discuss both the problems of literacy levels in society and the problems with measuring it accurately. Adrian goes over the central target that past literacy texts tried to hit or sometimes ignore and the missteps they make when they get it wrong. They discuss what has caused literacy panics and what those have looked like throughout the years. From the staccato rhythm of reading to the unexpected way people view images, our understanding of reading behavior has been transformed by technologies like the eye movement camera and the Tachistoscope. Adrian shares the ripple effect these tools have had on fields like marketing and user interface work.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Jerome Bruner’s idea of a good reader

43:39: The people who are the best readers are the people who have a hypothesis-testing model for how they read. So, as you imagine this, as your eyes are moving across the line, you are all the time predicting what the next word is going to be. And the people who are really good readers are better at predicting this. So they're making hypotheses, and then they're experimentally seeing whether the hypothesis is born out really fast. And if it's not, then they go back and come up with another hypothesis.

Does being a good text message reader mean you're also a good book reader?

53:34: Being a really good reader of text messages is not the same thing as being a really good reader of Moby Dick, but they're both good things. They're both worth having, and we want to train people to be masters of all of those things, which in a certain sense is what the people were aiming for in 1900, but we're in a different world now, so we have to adapt to that.

On looking at experts insights more than credentials

06:17: There's a notion that, in application, the science of reading can tell us how to make our schools create the next generation who will be more efficient and more adapted to the world in which they live.

Reading is not just about decoding words

52:32: Once you're beyond that very basic level of phonics character-by-character interpretation, it's not actually clear that the target that you are aiming at is one thing. So we think of reading singular as one or would be a gerund. One verb, but if you look around empirically at what happens in the professional social world, this thing, if it is one thing, is carried out in lots of different ways.

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