According to media reports citing South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo, a study shows that more than 90% of primary and junior high school students in South Korea cannot read and understand the specified content in textbooks as required, and the more students are addicted to short videos, the worse their reading comprehension skills will be.
According to reports, South Korea's Chungcheongnam-do Department of Education previously conducted a reading comprehension test on some elementary and junior high school students. A total of 145 junior high school students and 97 third-grade elementary school students participated in the test.
The results of the test report showed that 98% of primary school students and 92% of junior high school students failed to read the specified passage in the textbook within one minute. In another vocabulary test, 93% of primary school students and 96% of junior high school students failed to obtain passing scores.
The final results showed that all primary school students and 99.3% of junior high school students were identified as having "reading comprehension deficiencies."
The test also uses cameras to track the movement of students' gaze. During normal reading, the gaze should move parallel from left to right, but most students who fail to finish reading do not do this. They often have "retrograde and return of gaze" phenomena of reading halfway through and then returning to the beginning to read again. In addition, there are also "zigzag" paths where the gaze moves disorderly up, down, left, and right in the sentence.
The research team analyzed that this is related to students' stimulating reading habits of short videos: students who are accustomed to watching social media and short videos have difficulty forming the habit of reading text for a long time, and their eyes will keep wandering.
What is worrying is that with the popularization of smartphones, the number of students with "acquired dyslexia" has increased significantly, but there are almost no effective countermeasures. A similar situation does not only exist in South Korea, but also applies to the world.