Reading Comprehension in the Digital Age: How Teens Can Reclaim Deep Focus

Picture this: A high school student sits down to read an assigned chapter. Their phone buzzes. A notification. They glance, but, determined to “lock in,” they slide their phone aside.. Twenty minutes pass, and they’ve “read” five pages but can’t remember a single detail.

Sound familiar?

This scene has become the norm, not because today's middle and high schoolers don’t care about reading, but because they are growing up in an environment engineered to splinter attention into increasingly tiny pieces. Constant digital stimulation isn’t just competing with reading—it’s reshaping how students process information. And it’s taking a serious toll on one of the foundational skills they need to succeed in school and beyond: reading comprehension.

A 2025 Journal of the American Medical Association study found that both low and high increases in social media use throughout early adolescence were associated with lower performance on cognitive tasks tied to concentration, reading, and memory. As EdWeek noted, adolescents with rising social media use “performed an average of 1–2 points lower on reading and memory tests,” while those with high social media use performed up to four points lower.

The good news is that nothing about this trend is irreversible. When teachers understand how attention works and how comprehension is built, they gain the power to help students reclaim the deep focus that sustained reading requires.

What Is Reading Comprehension (And Why Does It Matter)?

Reading comprehension is a complex, active process in which students:

• Make meaning from individual words, phrases, and sentences

• Connect ideas across paragraphs and chapters

• Link new information to their background knowledge

• Interpret tone, figurative language, and implied meaning

• Evaluate arguments and form their own conclusions

Unlike the scanning students do while skimming headlines or flipping through short-form content, true comprehension demands sustained attention, deliberate thinking, and cognitive stamina.

And it’s not just an academic skill. Research shows that learning to read—and continuing to read deeply—reshapes the brain by strengthening neural pathways involved in language, memory, and abstract reasoning. Comprehension grows with consistent practice and weakens without it.

The Digital Dilemma: Why Screens Make Reading Harder

Students aren’t imagining it: Reading really does feel harder than it used to. The digital world most teens inhabit works directly against the slow, sustained processes deep reading relies on.

Constant interruptions

Teens who frequently multitask media—switching between apps, notifications, and open tabs—show higher levels of distractibility and lower academic performance. What feels like a tiny ping or pop-up actually forces the brain to stop, reorient, and restart the comprehension process, often taking minutes to recover.

Shrinking attention spans

On the American Psychological Association’s Speaking of Psychology podcast, UC Irvine researcher Gloria Mark, PhD, explained that the average attention span on a screen was about two-and-a-half minutes in 2004. By 2012, it had dropped to 75 seconds, and by 2023 it was at just 47 seconds. No wonder sustained reading feels foreign!

Surface-level processing

Online content trains the brain to skim: quick visuals, short sentences, and simplified syntax. A steady diet of this creates friction when students encounter the layered, nuanced language found in advanced-level texts.

Lower comprehension on screens

Research shows that reading on digital devices can reduce comprehension, particularly for younger and middle-grade readers, because digital texts encourage scanning rather than the linear, sequential reading that deep understanding requires.

None of this is the students’ fault. It’s simply a mismatch between an attention-fragmenting environment and a skill—sustained, effortful reading—that thrives on uninterrupted time and cognitive stillness.

How Deep Reading Strengthens Students’ Brains

Understanding what students gain from focused reading can motivate both teachers and teens to invest in rebuilding comprehension.

Stronger neural connections

Reading a novel deeply activates and strengthens networks in the brain's language and sensory systems. The more students read with understanding, the stronger these pathways become.

Improved focus and stamina

Deep reading is like strength training for attention. Each session increases students’ ability to concentrate—a skill that transfers to all subjects.

Better academic performance

The cognitive skills built through comprehension—analysis, critical thinking, and synthesis—form the backbone of success across disciplines.

Greater empathy and social understanding

Fiction, in particular, helps students understand perspectives different from their own, building emotional intelligence.

Practical Strategies to Improve Reading Comprehension

With a few intentional shifts, classrooms can become environments where students practice, strengthen, and ultimately reclaim deep reading skills.

Start Small and Build Gradually

Students don’t need hour-long reading sessions to make progress. In fact, starting too big can discourage them. Short, focused reading intervals of 10–15 minutes are enough to begin rebuilding stamina.

This mirrors Zinc Learning Labs’ approach to strengthening reading skills: small, consistent, appropriately challenging practice that accumulates over time.

Create a Distraction-Free Reading Environment

Students often underestimate how much the environment affects focus. Teachers can help them experiment with:

• Putting phones in another part of the room (not just face-down nearby)

• Using website blockers when reading digitally

• Establishing predictable, low-interruption reading time

• Choosing consistent, quiet spaces for reading

Even small shifts make comprehension more accessible.

Teach Active Reading Strategies

Deep comprehension comes from interaction—not passive reading. A few high-impact strategies include:

Visualizing concrete language

Encourage students to picture what they read when the text describes something sensory or tangible. We call this “Zinc-ing.”

Clarifying abstract ideas

Invite students to connect abstract concepts to personal examples or prior knowledge.

Tracking connections

Teach them to follow pronouns, transition words, and signal phrases—the “glue” of complex texts. This aligns with the Ignition Skills emphasized throughout Zinc’s reading protocol.

Noticing structure

Show students how paragraph organization, punctuation, and transitions guide meaning.

These skills make dense or unfamiliar texts far easier to navigate.

Let Students Choose Engaging Material When Possible

Motivation drives comprehension. Students are far more likely to persevere when they care about the topic.

Encourage them to explore a range of genres—fiction, biography, science, history, and current events—to find what truly captures their interest. Momentum from enjoyable reading builds confidence for tackling more challenging texts. Our blog on reading challenging texts explores this idea further.

Set Clear Goals and Encourage Reflection

Metacognition deepens reading comprehension. Teach students to:

• Set a clear goal before reading

• Pause to check their own understanding

• Summarize after reading (briefly and in their own words)

• Track how long they can stay focused and notice patterns

These habits strengthen awareness and endurance.

Balance Print and Digital Reading

Print supports deeper comprehension, especially for complex or heavily layered texts. Whenever possible:

• Use print for challenging material

• Reserve screens for lighter reading or quick reference

• Choose e-ink devices over backlit screens

This isn’t about banning technology; it’s about choosing the right mode for the task.

The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters Beyond Reading Scores

Helping students rebuild comprehension isn't just about improving test results or getting through assigned chapters. It's about equipping them with cognitive tools they need for postsecondary success.

Deep reading supports problem solving, critical thinking, communication, creativity, and resilience.

These are life skills. And reading comprehension strengthens all of them.

Your Next Step

The path to reclaiming strong reading comprehension requires practice.

Begin with one small shift in your classroom: a 10-minute, distraction-free reading window paired with a simple purpose (e.g., “track the author’s claim”). Encourage students to try the same step at home.

Then repeat it the next day.

Bit by bit, students can reclaim the deep focus that digital distractions have eroded. They can become stronger thinkers, more capable readers, and more confident learners.

The digital world isn’t going anywhere. But neither is the human need for sustained, meaningful engagement with ideas. Teachers have the power to help students rediscover that capacity.

“How to Get Kids to Hate English”

The New York Times recently published How to Get Kids to Hate English by Pamela Paul, an op-ed on the decrease of interest in English and literature. Our founder/CEO Matt Bardin has some thoughts on it:

All the hand-wringing about the end of literature majors and even reading in general ignores basic facts. 

Only 13 percent of American adults read at or above adult-level proficiency, and there's no reason to imagine that’s much better or worse than it ever was.

Having taught middle and high school kids for decades, I’m sure the internet and the Common Core haven’t helped, but blaming them ignores the real problem. Kids hate reading because only a small minority—probably about 13%—develops advanced comprehension. The mechanisms by which successful readers turn words and phrases into images, meanings, and ideas in our heads come naturally to a few. Expecting everyone else to just get it when years of evidence prove they don’t is like throwing our children in the water and wondering why most of them drown. 

I wouldn’t count reading out though. In fact, it’s an ideal antidote to the misery wreaked by the sugar high of social media. We just need to equip more people with the skills those of us who enjoy reading take for granted.

What do you think about ELA class’ role in getting kids to love reading and have the skills to do so successfully? How can we bring more joy to English courses? Let us know at partnerships@zinclearninglabs.com, and check out our solutions here.

Why Start the Year with Reading Instruction?

Why Start the Year with Reading Instruction?

Many middle- and high-school students still struggle to comprehend what they’re reading. When words on the page aren’t successfully translated into meaningful images and ideas, it’s difficult—or even impossible—to take on higher-level topics like tone, author’s purpose, text structure, and argument. 

Zinc’s Ignition bridges these gaps by teaching the four essential close reading skills all advanced readers use naturally. In just two weeks, Ignition raises reading levels and gives everyone in your classroom an edge so you can confidently dive into the curriculum ahead.

Who Benefits from Ignition?

Auto-differentiated to accommodate abilities from 4th grade through college, Ignition is for ALL readers. In just one minute, you can cue up two weeks of individualized reading growth instruction for everyone in your class.

Need to keep your fast flyers engaged? Power Up activities unlock if students finish the required passages early, keeping every student engaged while providing opportunities to work at their own pace.

How can all teachers share Ignition strategies with their students?

Zinc’s Free Teacher Resources lay the foundation for improving reading skills.  Use these mini-lessons with your students and follow them up by layering Zinc’s Ignition reading strategies over the next text you read with your students!

What do you think?

Try out Zinc Ignition here.  How might you use Zinc-ing and Tracking, the key strategies in Ignition, to support your students in comprehending more complex texts? Let us know at partnerships@zinclearninglabs.com.

The Power of the Purposeful Pause

Taking breaks, or a purposeful pause, while learning new things can enhance focus and concentration, provide time for processing new information and improve retention.

Zinc Ignition

We created Ignition because we often hear from middle and high school teachers that they need more resources for teaching reading comprehension. Striving readers need to be able to read grade level texts—and all readers should be prepared to access college-level texts. We've identified four key skills that have the biggest impact on reading comprehension:

• Use Your Senses: tapping into sensory words and phrases

• Make It Real: connecting real examples to abstract ideas

• Pronouns: tracking pronouns to their antecedents to stay connected to the writer's point

• Navigators: following the signals and layers authors create to make meaning

For increased retention and internalization of these key skills, Zinc recommends purposeful pauses. Ignition allows students to make their way through passages and questions, working with increasingly difficult texts. Students receive extra instruction and practice if they reach a skill that challenges them. In the past, Ignition included a built-in and purposeful pause between Make It Real and Pronouns to support students in exercising those skills over time. While Zinc has removed that required pause for added flexibility in the classroom, Ignition remains chunked into Module 1 and Module 2 to encourage a short break.

Vocabulary Sets

Purposeful pauses are effective with vocabulary growth as well. Zinc recommends assigning vocabulary games with spaced repetition for larger, unit-long vocabulary word sets. With Zinc’s spaced repetition, students learn and review each word during six exposures over a two-month period. Each exposure consists of two or more gameplay modes (Image, Sentence, Synonym, or Definition). To facilitate long-term memory, the time between each exposure increases as students progress.

During spaced repetition, a student must wait the designated length of time between exposures. They will be notified on their Zinc homepage when the next exposure is available. The chart below shows the length of time between each of the six exposures.

What do you think?

Try out Zinc Vocabulary here. Reach out to us at partnerships@zinclearninglabs.com to share your thoughts on the Purposeful Pause, Zinc Vocabulary, and Spaced Repetition.

Zinc Receives College Board CEO Breakthrough Award

We’re proud to announce that Zinc Learning Labs has been given the CEO Breakthrough Award by David Coleman, CEO of College Board. This award recognizes Zinc's “dedication, persistence, and unique achievement in student engagement, secondary reading growth, and meaningful test prep.”

David Coleman says, “Beset as they are on all sides with anxiety producing distractions, our teens need deep, thoughtful reading now more than ever. Zinc delivers results in a manner likely to inspire young people and transform classrooms and learning.”

This award showcases the benefits of Zinc Learning Labs for students, teachers, schools, and districts. Whether you are new to Zinc or needing to maintain access as SpringBoard winds down, there has never been a better time to make Zinc a resource for your teachers.

A Love-Based Reading Solution

Zinc Learning Labs is a research-backed system that promotes reading success in secondary classrooms. Offering a selection of reading programs, assessments, and targeted activities, Zinc love-driven approach provides students an auto-leveled and self-paced experience. Zinc partners with schools and districts across the country to teach students crucial reading skills and encourage a love of reading.

Partnerships with CollegeBoard and SpringBoard

The College Board, often referred to as CollegeBoard, is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to expanding access to higher learning. Founded in 1899, the College Board helps students prepare for college and provides standardized testing for the college admission process. The College Board’s programs include the SAT and SAT Subject Tests, the PSAT/NMSQT, and the Advanced Placement Program.

Zinc Learning Labs has partnered with the College Board and their SpringBoard program to provide access to Zinc for millions of students. Zinc provided real-world articles and texts, crafted Vocabulary Games, and interactive Close Reading Experiences to complement SpringBoard’s curriculum. While with SpringBoard, Zinc not only made it easy for teachers to assign multi-week reading programs, real-world articles and quizzes, vocabulary games, and interactive guided reading, but strengthened reading skills so students could better access SpringBoard’s grade-level content. 

Award-Winning Excellence with Zinc Learning Labs

In recognition of Zinc’s contribution to education, the College Board presented Zinc with the CEO Breakthrough Award. This special award highlights Zinc’s achievements with teachers, students, and administrators. With Zinc, students learn skills they can apply to every text they read and every test they take.

The award reads as follows: “Zinc Learning Labs has created a fresh, research-backed system to ignite engagement and reading success in secondary classrooms. Zinc's four strategies teach students what to do when they read, making complex texts more accessible, critical thinking more applicable, and classroom conversations more vibrant. Zinc’s unique combination of novel methodology backed by a robust edtech platform that offers differentiation by both reading level and reading interests, makes us hopeful for a brighter future for college-ready reading and secondary learning in general.”

The Future of Zinc After SpringBoard

With SpringBoard winding down, schools and districts have the opportunity to continue with Zinc directly. Zinc offers rostering options like Clever, ClassLink, and Google Classroom. Zinc will continue to sync with your digital rosters, keeping your Zinc classes accurate and up to date. Schools and educators may also choose to roster with Zinc directly. 

Zinc’s online platform continues to be a popular tool for teachers, schools, and districts, as it allows teachers to scale their efforts in an efficient and positive way. Zinc’s many reading and vocabulary options also make it a handy tool for tutors and homeschool teachers.

Zinc will continue to offer groundbreaking reading programs to equip students and save time for teachers. Zinc’s Ignition is a two-week, hyper-differentiated program that teaches students valuable reading skills. With live-action video guides, Ignition functions like a virtual tutor, teaching students foundational skills for navigating texts. In a few moments, teachers can provide every student with two weeks’ worth of individualized content. The skills that students learn and practice through Ignition will benefit them in every text they encounter.

Following Ignition, Zinc recommends Lift-Off, a program that provides four weeks of student-selected content. Lift-Off allows students to select texts at their reading level that match their own interests. Teachers can adjust the workload to fit their expectations and schedule, with options to include vocabulary, additional articles, and Zinc’s interactive Closer Reading Experiences. At the conclusion of each Lift-Off, students receive two customized book recommendations.

Thank You to Everyone Who Made This Possible!

The team at Zinc is honored to accept the CEO Breakthrough Award. We’re thankful to the College Board and David Coleman for recognizing our hard work and dedication. Above all, we’re thankful for the teachers and students who use Zinc every day, creating stronger readers and building a culture of reading. 

If you’d like to learn more about Zinc, you can try out interactive demos of Reading Ignition, Lift Off, Vocabulary Games, Articles & Quizzes, Close Reading Experiences, and even Test Prep. If you follow the previous link, you can also schedule a personal demo with a member of the Zinc team. If you’re new to Zinc or looking for a new way to access this resource, we look forward to hearing from you!

How to Persuade Teenagers (and Adults!) to Read Challenging Texts

What are the pleasures of reading, and how will anyone enjoy them in the digital age?

by Matt Bardin, Zinc Learning Labs Founder and CEO

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When I was a kid, my parents explained how 19th-century sailors ate no fruits and vegetables and got scurvy. I wondered about my teeth falling out as I forced down mandatory carrots.

Most parents and educators I meet use that scurvy logic to promote reading. You’d better read books to make you smarter, more worldly, more empathic—to get into college, land a higher-paying job, a better career…

All of these things are true, but please stop. It’s not working.

Put simply, only one valid motivation exists for reading: pleasure.

Certainly reading entertains and transports us. A used, paperback thriller, mystery, or even historical fiction has more narrative, escapist bang for your buck than any movie or TV show (especially if it’s 800 pages long!). The information density in books compared with, say, podcasts or videos, delivers a much deeper pleasure in learning—of becoming better informed about anything from invertebrates to investing.

Beyond just facts, however, great texts open and build out new regions in the mind. The best writing materializes new ways of seeing, thinking about, and understanding the world in a kind of thrilling mental homecoming. Yes, that makes sense. I’ve been here before. Well, no I haven’t. But now I’m here. And I belong. Given that language is the operating system for our brains, sometimes the words and syntax themselves deliver that profoundly satisfying expansiveness.

Okay, wait a minute. All of that isn’t quite scurvy or rickets, but anyone with a smartphone, much less those of us trying to influence teenagers, knows the long list of digital treats barring the path between our brains and books. In my childhood home, no kid chose a piece of fruit while a single cookie remained in the cupboard. How can we expect anyone to read when reels, clips, and heart-stopping explosions call to us from our pockets?

Technology succeeds by making things easier. Tech’s highest, most lucrative achievement, our online existence, transfixes us with a constantly refreshing torrent of novel stimuli requiring less and less effort. Before picking up a static, paper book with no pictures, we must choose NOT to watch a movie, TV show, sports highlights, how-to videos, or up-to-the-minute influencers. We must opt out of shorter, newer news articles and the infographics and video clips that increasingly accompany them, much less tweets, posts, stories, reels… Mark Zuckerberg must have felt like a genius for acquiring Instagram—until TikTok came along with faster cuts and a better algorithm.

In this environment, isn’t reading higher-level texts, including books, poetry, essays, and scientific studies pretty much over? An esoteric art for a shrinking cohort of nerds and their descendants?

No. Not at all. Every parent and increasingly most kids know that living online robs us of something essential. Reading, especially on an adult level—a profound pleasure that has never reached more than maybe 15% of the population, solves one of the biggest problems in our digital lives and, therefore, finally has the chance to become ubiquitous.

The internet has killed advanced reading the way the tractor ended physical effort. When technology eradicated manual labor from most lives, many people became sedentary, but, within a short few decades, hundreds of millions began voluntarily exercising.

That’s about to happen much faster with reading, and the change will be led not by older adults but by millennials and teens.

The ease of the internet disempowers. It feeds us endless novelties, but, as the scientist in Jurassic Park watching his zoo animal devour a goat observes, “T-rex doesn’t wanna be fed. He wants to hunt.” Effortful reading restores and rejuvenates. It’s our most interactive media—an act of collaborative creation between reader and writer that connects us across cultures and eras.

Digital tech’s success contains the seeds of our screens’ demise. They suck us in. Their tricks work. Yes, I do want to learn about these other products that match my past purchases! Just one more football/basketball/soccer/hockey/baseball highlights video won’t take that long. And, yeah, I do “need to know” about another outrageous thing perpetrated by opponents of my political side! No one emerges from a day/afternoon/evening spent on a screen feeling refreshed, but teens and millennials are on another level.

Raised on first Snapchat and Instagram and now TikTok, they coined the term “brainrot” to describe the negative side effect. Before I was born, my dad had a three-pack-a-day smoking habit. He lit the next one off the dying embers of the last. That’s about where many teens stand with regard to their phones. Unlike their peers even five or ten years ago, the current generation knows they have a problem—a minimally pleasurable, soul-shrinking addiction. I never saw my dad smoke. He quit when he could no longer stand the hacking cough he woke up to every day. Online adolescence has brought an entire generation to an anxiety/depression precipice that has them ready to gnaw through their digital cage, and reading offers a powerful antidote

The greatest pleasure of reading may be the effort itself. Unlike almost everything on our screens, reading places non-trivial demands on our minds. The words live on a static page with no sounds or pictures, much less video. Our brains must do the heavy lifting of converting letters into imagined sounds and then, as we “hear” them in our heads, connecting those words with images, ideas, and experiences. For several thousand years, writers have attempted to put whatever lightning they feel in the bottle of poems, essays, plays, and books. None of these has any meaning or value though without the brains of readers working to construct them.

That simple abracadabra—our minds’ reanimating of the stored energy of words—can feel good when we read the cereal box. Certain texts, some sacred, some profane, have a mysterious protean power to reward our exertions with fresh manifestations every time we return to them, like fresh buds on some immortal bush. Every time we work the levers of our brains to experience those words, we find more and still more flowers for the bees…

If we see reading only as entertainment or a source of information, digital options preempt it. But the cognitive load—the effort required to sound out words and then form them into meanings in the mind—makes reading so much more meaningful as streaming algorithms capture our attention and delete our agency.

Are we all ready for this kind of rigorous brain workout routine? Probably. Young people definitely are, but they will need catalysts—supportive peers and adults who help them find the energy to start the reaction. Maybe we all will. In any case, here are the steps anyone wanting this cure will need to take:

Step 1: Desire. There’s a crucial difference between wanting to do something beneficial and doing it (and maybe an even bigger difference between doing it once and getting in the habit of doing it), BUT the inner spark that can kindle action needs nurturing and acknowledgement, even when no action gets taken. Sometimes just the impulse needs to happen hundreds of times before any deed. Discuss the benefits of reading but expect nothing. Look for the sparks but with honest curiosity about their experience. If you’re a parent, you may need a tutor, teacher, or relative to catalyze this first step, as anything you say may curdle instantly into conflict or pressure, thereby cooking the seeds.

Step 2: Choice. Do you want to read fantasy? Historical fiction? Classics? Philosophy? Mysteries? Do you want to learn about science, nature, or investing? You’re hunting that first, breakthrough reading pleasure. If you are a reader trying to get your students or children to read, perhaps you know what they would love. Suggest it. But respect the sanctity of their autonomy. There are tens of thousands of “great” texts to read, but it only matters what they think. If they want to read comic books or vampire romances, that’s fine. Just be ready with heartier fare when Captain Underpants loses its luster. And no point in continuing to read anything that’s not grabbing them.

Step 3: Build an off switch. Eventually, a great book will pull you away from your screens (and keep you blissfully away for hours!). But how to start? As they say in AA, the mind leads. Your lizard brain will always want to watch another video. Freedom begins when you don’t—when you find and practice tripping the override. Even if you don’t immediately pick up a book, creating a mental off switch for your devices is a non-negotiable baby step towards self-restoration.

Step 4: Reading is “Zinc-ing.” We made up that word to describe the imagination’s conversion of text to images, ideas, meanings, and experiences. The mind likes that effort. Even reading, “Springfield is the capital of Illinois” feels good if you let your brain enjoy those words. You’ve probably never been there, but what an odd thing to say. “Spring” and “field” are a pleasure, but what a generic and weird name for a city and how uncanny to juxtapose the fun sounds of the strangely spelled “Illinois,” first, if you happen to know them, with the devastating connotations of French colonists, cultural erasure, and genocide, and then secondly with the utter blandness of this sentence. Of course, you probably won’t bring all that consciousness to this sentence the way you might if you were reading “Hope is the thing with feathers,” but readers enjoy reading. The process is the same.

Step 5: Commit to ten pages. Habituated as we are to less-effortful stimuli, actually applying Step 4 above to a new text involves resistance. My initial reaction to pretty much every book I read—even those I end up loving—is, Well, this is boring. Paradoxically, the most rewarding voices on the page confront us with new patterns that take getting used to. Give yourself ten pages of concerted Zinc-ing. If you’re not with the writer after ten pages, move on. Go to the library or a bookstore. There are too many great things to read to waste more effort, but fighting through that first layer rewards you even if you put the book down.

If you’re trying to help someone who says they HATE reading, be compassionate and understanding. They’re probably not very good at it. Sure, they can “read”—meaning sound out the letters, but they may be scanning quickly for information or expecting the novel you gave them to sweep them away like their favorite TV show does. Not gonna happen. At least not till they know how to enjoy the effort.

If you or someone you know can help them discover that pleasure, they will come around. Yes, it involves effort, but the internet is making our teeth fall out.

You can follow Matt on Substack: https://substack.com/@mattbardin2.

Zinc Learning Labs Receives Clean SOC 2 Type 2 Attestation Report!

Zinc Learning Labs is proud to announce that we’ve received a clean SOC 2 Type 2 attestation report.

This rigorous, independent assessment of our internal security controls serves as validation of our dedication and adherence to the highest standards for security, confidentiality and availability. 

This is an important milestone but is in no way an end to our commitment to our customers and the security of their data. Zinc Learning Labs views security as the foundation upon which our products are built and upon which trust with our customers is earned and maintained. 

Conducted by ACCORP Partners, a nationally recognized CPA firm registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, this attestation report affirms that Zinc Learning Labs’ information security practices, policies, procedures, and operations meet the rigorous SOC 2 Trust Service Criteria for security, confidentiality and availability.

Developed by the AICPA, SOC 2 is an extensive auditing procedure that ensures that a company is handling customer data securely and in a manner that protects the organization as well as the privacy of its customers. SOC 2 is designed for service providers storing customer data in the cloud.

As more enterprises look to process sensitive and confidential business data with cloud-based services like Zinc Learning Labs, it’s critical that they do so in a way that ensures their data will remain safe. Our customers carry this responsibility on their shoulders every single day, and it’s important that the vendors they select to process their data in the cloud approach that responsibility in the same way. 

We welcome all customers and prospects who are interested in discussing our commitment to security and reviewing our SOC compliance reports to contact us at partnerships@zinclearninglabs.com.

Love-Driven Effort: Student Agency in the Digital Age

by Matt Bardin, Zinc Learning Labs Founder and CEO

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No matter how cynical we teachers become, there is no deeper satisfaction than our students' growth.

In my work developing reading software for teens, I interact with secondary schools across America. Paradoxically, given how far behind the students are, the teacher always seems by far the hardest working person in every classroom. Between the pandemic and screen-induced brainrot, the effort to engage students has gotten much harder. Amazingly, I see teachers continuing to bring massive effort. Our ever-illusive reward? To see that light turn on in their eyes.

Teachers have always fought an uphill battle. Tasked with responsibility for others’ growth, we have limited authority over our students’ actions. We are coaches who don’t pick our players. To succeed, we need them to want to play, but the dubious traditional carrot and stick motivators—mainly grades—that our teachers used with us feel increasingly ineffectual in our new era. The pandemic left many students even more behind and hopeless about carrots, even as refinements in social media train their minds on a steady diet of the most passive pleasures.

The basic units of motivation have always been external and fear-driven. Work hard in school, we’ve told students, or you’ll get a bad grade, disappoint your family, look foolish in front of peers, or fail to get into college or secure a good job. We have been trying to train people like we train dogs. We love our pets, but our students’ lives demand cognitive skills that go way beyond obedience and rote moves.

Valid though these threats may be, they never worked well for a large majority. Decades of disappointing student results on standardized tests confirm what all successful educators know intuitively: if you push someone who’s stumbling, they fall down.

The wisdom of the internet explains these failures. With impressive determination and efficiency, big tech has discovered, cultivated and exploited neurological short cuts to our innate human laziness. None of the outside consequences mentioned above rewards the pleasure centers in our brains the way an endless stream of cute, surprising videos or exploding alien spaceships does. Almost all teens still want to please parents and teachers. Most still care about grades. But these fear-driven, extrinsic inducements cannot compete with the blunt force of intrinsic, algorithmic swipes and scrolls.

This is a huge opportunity for educators.

Should we reinvent learning to compete with screens as a garden of digital delights? We certainly must learn from the behavioral axioms the internet reveals, but, as Duolingo co-founder Luis von Ahn points out, learning, which is inherently hard, can never drive attention the way experiences engineered to be as easy as possible can. To succeed, our students need to exert themselves.

The victories of their screens over our students’ minds both demand a new approach from educators and create the conditions for something truly new and better.

Life online demolishes agency, our attentions and sense of self seamlessly extracted from us by the limitless novelty of the internet. No one feels the distraction, anxiety, and loss of self wrought by our screens more keenly than our post-pandemic young people.

But how can school compete, much less help?

As fun and compelling as dance clips, NFL mock drafts, or doomscrolling are, no one feels refreshed and invigorated by an afternoon on Reddit or TikTok. Hours of scrolling will never compete with the satisfaction of reading a great novel or mastering a difficult skill. Von Ahn points out one advantage his app has over apps that merely distract and entertain: “When you’re learning something,” he says, “You get meaning out of it.”

The same can be said about making real effort of any kind. I still can’t tell my students how learning [substitute any topic a student finds difficult, from Shakespeare to cellular respiration] will serve them in their future, but the massive abyss of pre-digested internet “content” gnawing at their souls makes the exertion needed to learn anything redemptive. Joan Didion characterized such efforts as “small disciplines” and identified them as the key to the quality most desperately sought by so many adolescents: self-respect. When we work hard at something just for practice, we learn to trust ourselves and our powers. Doing so for a grade never delivers the same value.

Yes, we’re all lazy. No, we can’t all be saints or geniuses. But we also all—every one of us—love to work hard. There is no meaning or satisfaction in life without effort. That contradictory idea—that we’re all lazy, living for the weekend AND that we all love and need serious effort—must replace the carrot/stick model that never worked, bred discord and dysfunction, and is currently being dealt the coup de grace by digital tech.

Our classrooms can become a refuge of agency from the ocean of online distraction, not by telling our students to work hard or scaring them about their futures, but by getting them to experience and appreciate meaningful effort. Giving them choices helps. So does understanding their needs and providing tools that challenge each student at an appropriate ability level. But truly getting them in the game depends on their desire to play.

Thousands of hours of swiping and scrolling condition the mind to want to be done. As one teacher in Florida put it, “I don’t know where they’re in such a rush to get to!” Whenever my students work hard at something, I ask them what felt good about it. Some will say, “Nothing.” They act as if I’m trying to trick them into some kind of sacrifice. I’m not. I’m trying to give them the biggest gift they’ll ever get: the power of themselves. That’s usually good enough for most of them.

I’m not suggesting you change your approach to teaching because the old ways are failing, which they are, or to improve your students' test scores, which this will. Tech can support you with tools, but only teachers can transform learning. You should interest your students in love-driven effort because YOUR love for THEIR growth is your superpower.

You can follow Matt on Substack: https://substack.com/@mattbardin2.

Free Resources to Put the Joy Back in Reading

In a survey at the end of the 2022-2023 school year, The National Center for Education Statistics reported that only 14% of 13-year-olds surveyed said that they read for fun almost every day. This reflected over a 10% drop from 2012. At Zinc, we strive to put joy back in reading by both exposing students to texts on topics of their choice and teaching them what to do when they read. But our real dream is that all secondary students will have a book in their backpack—a book that they are reading for fun. 

To build excitement around reading, Zinc has developed Flight Reading Mission—a free, downloadable, classroom-ready kit with slide shows, activities, book-themed missions, and weekly point trackers to get your students reading and encourage a culture of independent reading in your classroom and on your campus. You can implement Live Mind as a six-week reading journey, or pick and choose from book-themed elements that fit your class needs.

Read the Room Book Choosing Game

A major goal of Live Mind is putting books in backpacks. We all want students to find books they enjoy reading. Live Mind is designed to promote positive reading habits like seeking out books for yourself.

Read the Room is an active game that helps students find a book that grabs their attention. A class can play in the classroom or school library. Google Slides are available with the rules to make things easier. All teachers need to provide are books!

Live Mind Missions and Points

In Live Mind, students can earn points by reading and by embracing the fun of reading. Each week, students will receive missions that help them engage with what they’re reading and practice positive reading habits. A short mission might be taking a selfie with their book or visiting the library. More involved activities would be creating a meal or a work of art based on their book.

Teachers set a goal for their classroom, and students will choose how they participate. We provide the missions, reading trackers, and a way to track classroom points. Students can track their pages or time spent reading, and a wide variety of missions means there will be something for everyone to try.

Book Talk

One of the best parts of reading is talking about books with other readers. For Weeks 2 to 5, Live Mind provides topics for small groups. These quick, fun discussion questions help students think about what they’re reading and share with their peers.

Book Talk is shared as a set of Google Slides, so teachers can easily share that week’s question with your students. Participating in Book Talks also helps students earn points toward the class goal!

Celebration Guide

When a class reaches the finish line for Live Mind, it’s time to celebrate! Students have worked hard and found some new ways to enjoy books along the way. With a class celebration, teachers can encourage students to keep up the excitement they’ve developed for reading.

We offer suggestions for fun ways to have a fun, reading-related celebration with your class that don’t require a ton of work or resources. Teachers are invited to let us know how they celebrate reading, and we look forward to sharing that excitement with you! 

Get Live Mind from Zinc

For a sneak preview, check out Zinc Book Talk, a multi-week set of book-themed conversation starters you can use as your next Do Now.

Do you want Live Mind delivered directly to your inbox? Enter your email below and we’ll make sure you’re the first to get the Live Mind kit when it launches in early January.

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