Course slides, notes, summaries. It is on these materials that university exams are prepared today, while textbooks increasingly remain closed. The professors themselves say it: according to a survey conducted by Talents Venture for the Italian Publishers Association (AIE) on 463 teachers from 34 universities, 68% believe that having lost the habit of studying texts in full is one of the main causes of students’ poor preparation.
The paradox is that for 88% of teachers the manual remains the most effective teaching tool, but only 17% think it is actually read. In the last 3-5 years, 83% have noticed a change in the way they study: fewer recommended or obligatory texts, more summaries and growing fatigue when faced with long or complex pages. Today the most used materials are course presentations (69%) and notes (52%).
The consequences, according to the professors, can be seen in the exams. The most cited deficit is the reduced capacity for analysis and critical reasoning (41%), followed by notional and superficial preparation (28%), difficulty in connecting topics (24%) and poor understanding of basic concepts (19%). And artificial intelligence? For 55% of teachers its impact is negative, especially when it is used passively, to get answers rather than to understand.
It must be said that these are teachers’ perceptions, not an objective measure of students’ skills, and that the survey was commissioned by the publishers, that is, by those who produce the manuals. The data were presented in Rome at the AIE conference “From fragile knowledge to critical knowledge”, where the association also asked for a book bonus for families and more to combat piracy, which according to publishers is now worth more than the entire university market.
