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About The Deep Reader
I met the hidden curriculum in my first doctoral seminar. Thirty research articles a week, ten to fifteen hours of reading, and nobody had ever taught me, or most of my classmates, how to critically read one. So, most of us faked it ‘til we made it.
An AI can summarize any of those research articles in seconds, and the summary will report what the article says. But it can’t tell you whether the evidence supports the claim, what the author left out, or what any of it means in a broader context. A summary is like a receipt: it records what you bought, not whether you were overcharged or actually received the merchandise you ordered.
Because of rapid advances in frontier AI models, I think it’s safe to say that the old model of college is finished: transfer information, test, recall. AI killed it (or in some sectors, is still killing it). What survives is the work of evaluating an argument and reaching a conclusion about its strengths and limitations.
That work has a name and a literature. Critical reading of scientific research is part of a hidden curriculum, the set of unwritten rules that academic insiders treat as natural and universal, and that screen students out. Ermien van Pletzen, a professor at the University of Cape Town, wrote in 2006 that hidden expectations “screen some students, and especially students from non-mainstream, non-middle-class English backgrounds, out of education.” Between 40 and 60 percent of American doctoral candidates finish every requirement except the dissertation, and that rate has held since the 1970s. I spent five years at Johns Hopkins measuring one piece of it: most higher education programs do not teach doctoral students to read critically and systematically. The ones who never work it out are the ones whose writing stalls and whose contributions we lose.
CERIC is the method I developed out of that work, and it rhymes with cleric. There are five critical questions that we can systematically ask of any text:
Claim. What new knowledge (or opinion) is this text actually asserting?
Evidence. What data supports the claim, and how strong is that support?
Reasoning. Is the logic connecting evidence to claim robust, and does it hold up to scrutiny?
Implications. If this claim is correct, what follows?
Context. Who wrote this, when, why, and what was the motivation?
Check what an AI does with this list. It almost always answers only the first question while the other four are fluent gibberish. But these five questions only become more valuable every time an AI gets better at the first one.
What you’ll get here is essays on the reading crisis in higher education and what college is for now. I also do CERIC walkthroughs that put the method on a real text, whether that’s a news story, a research paper, or AI output itself.
This newsletter is for professors and education leaders rebuilding their courses, parents and students deciding what four years is worth, and any reader who suspects that skimming or AI has made them easier to fool.
Cited Works:
van Pletzen, E. (2006). A body of reading: making ‘visible’ the reading experiences of first-year medical students. In L. Thesen & E. van Pletzen. Academic Literacy and the Languages of Change (pp.104-129). London, England: Continuum.
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About Genevive Bjorn
I’m a researcher, author, and educator, and The Deep Reader is where I think out loud about reading, judgment, and what college is for now.
I hold a doctorate in education from Johns Hopkins University, with a specialization in online learning and instructional design; a master’s in education and a teaching credential from UC San Diego; and a bachelor’s in biology, chemistry and anthropology from Boston University.
I write for the students that the system screens out disproportionately: the first-generation doctoral student who doesn’t know the unspoken rules; the international student who is brilliant and prepared, and whom nobody told how the system works; and the foster youth who deserved better.
You can find more of my work at genevivebjorn.com or cericmethod.com.
How I Use AI at The Deep Reader
I’ve been publishing since 2007. That’s nineteen years of reporting, writing, and filing on deadline, and I did most of it with nothing on my desk smarter than spellcheck. But the attention economy runs a faster clock than the one I trained on, so I offload the low-effort work to keep up and ensure that my critical reading stays slow.
I ask my students and clients to be transparent about their tools. Here’s how I use AI in this newsletter.
Research support. I use an assistant to locate sources, to find studies I remember only in part, and to trace a claim back to whoever made it first. Then I read the work myself before I cite it, and I verify the information. If I can’t verify it, it doesn’t go in.
Editorial logistics. AI keeps my calendar and my deadlines, and it knows a post is due Tuesday, reminds me on Saturday, and tells me when to share it.
Grammar and spelling. Grammarly Pro does my copyediting. Running an essay through it can move that essay from a human score to an AI score in Pangram. I have watched it happen. That should worry anyone who needs help with spelling.
Brainstorming. When an essay needs three examples, and I have two, I ask for ideas. I keep one and write it out myself, which usually makes it shorter and odder.
What AI does not do here is build my arguments, draft my prose, or read on my behalf.
Learn the Method
CERIC is five questions: Claim, Evidence, Reasoning, Implications and Context. Ask them in order and an argument comes apart in about ten minutes. The course teaches faculty how to teach it, and gives students the version nobody handed them in a syllabus.
Work with Me
I give talks and run workshops for colleges, high schools and conferences on deep reading, source evaluation and what AI is doing to student attention. Formats run from a 60-minute keynote to a full faculty development day.
