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are our schools meeting this demand? In short, no. Or at least, not well enough. As a country we have devoted many resources to early childhood education initiatives that teach children to read. But once students possess these basic skills, they must be taught to interpret the information they read, to think critically, to write clearly, and to communicate effectively. Unfortunately, middle and high school students are not meeting state and national standards for basic reading proficiency, let alone developing higher literacy skills. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 38% of twelfth graders read at or above the proficient level.

Promoting adolescent literacy cannot be limited to reading and writing. To be highly literate in our culture involves mastering many different types of literacy- digital, financial, health, media, etc. If a student graduates high school able to read and write, but is unable to use a computer, we would consider their functional literacy limited. Yes, this is an oversimplification, but it serves to illustrate this point: literacy is defined and influenced by cultural and societal standards. And in a consumerist society such as ours, our jobs dictate many of those standards. These jobs demand digital literacy.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading.

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

Frequent users of smartphones quickly get used to the “auto-complete” function of their devices—the way they need only type a few letters and the phone fills in the rest. Maybe too used to it, in fact. This handy function seems to make adolescent users faster, but less accurate, when responding to a battery of cognitive tests, according to research published in 2009 in the journal Bioelectromagnetics.

A study led by researchers at the University of Coventry in Britain surveyed a group of eight- to twelve-year-olds about their texting habits, then asked them to write a sample text in the lab. The scientists found that kids who sent three or more text messages a day had significantly lower scores on literacy tests than children who sent none

The ready availability of search engines is changing the way we use our memories, reported psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University in a study published in Science last year. When people expect to have future access to information, Sparrow wrote, “they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.” It’s good to know where to find the information you need—but decades of cognitive science research shows that skills like critical thinking and problem-solving can be developed only in the context of factual knowledge. In other words, you’ve got to have knowledge stored in your head, not just in your computer.