Youth literacy in Australia is in decline and researchers are concerned social media is a contributing factor. Source: ACU.
Four months on from Australia’s world-first laws prohibiting social media use for under 16s, many young people are finding their way around the ban.
Australian Catholic University researchers are trying to determine how much social media teens are still using by surveying their parents.
Signy Wegener has seen her own child continue to access social media platforms despite government legislation.
“I am a parent of a 13-year-old whose use of social media has not been impacted by the ban, and she reports that many of her friends have had similar experiences,” Dr Wegener said.
Research shows that since the pandemic there has been a massive increase in youth social media usage, while at the same time, young people are spending less free time on constructive hobbies – such as reading.
Literacy among young Australians is concerningly low, with data showing that one in three Australian children cannot read proficiently, and nearly a third of teens don’t read books for pleasure.
Dr Wegener, from ACU’s Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy, said Australian literacy rates have been falling for two decades.
“The results of the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment in 2022 revealed that around 49 per cent of Australian 15-year-olds failed to meet the minimum national proficient standard in reading, a figure that was 16 per cent higher than in 2003,” she said.
Dr Wegener and her colleagues are asking parents of 10–15-year-olds about their views and experiences of the Albanese Government’s under-16s social media ban.
“We are particularly interested in whether it has effectively restricted social media access and impacted their child’s time spent reading,” Dr Wegener said.
ARC Laureate Professor Anne Castles, who is leading a program exploring teenage literacy, said the survey will provide an important baseline for understanding how the ban is working now and how this might evolve over time.
It’s hoped that this will help with discovering ways to arrest the nation’s literacy decline
Take the survey here.
FULL STORY
