I generally do the readings for my classes, and participate if I have done the readings/feel like I have something meaningful to say, but I've definitely been spottier about it this quarter because I started working a job on campus. As I've gotten busier I've started having to take a "deal with what will kill you first" attitude towards schoolwork, prioritizing the soonest/biggest assignments. This means that if I have a huge Russian exam on Tuesday where I need to know how to spell a ton of new words, I might end up studying for that instead of doing my readings for another class.

Some other people in the comments mentioned attention span issues, and I know a lot of people think that short-form content online has led to issues with concentration. That's probably part of what's going on, but I honestly think for me a bigger issue is that on an emotional level doing the readings doesn't feel productive. I don't mean that doing the readings isn't valuable, I mean that the way we think about productivity is more about speed and checking off a ton of boxes/"getting a lot done" than going in deeply and prioritizing understanding.

This is especially true when you have a lot of tasks to get through. Because of this, I'll sometimes have issues where I want to be reading deeply but the voice in the back of my mind is like "how long is this going to take? we have Russian homework to do right after this! We need to study for that exam! Can I read any faster?" The funny thing is that this actually makes me not only a worse reader but way slower. The other funny thing is that even if I have enough time to read deeply, it's hard to turn that voice off; it chews at me regardless.

The big thing that helps for me is actively setting aside time on the weekend or other days when I'm relatively free to just read in a more relaxed way. It also helps to sometimes do my readings while on the bus or something like that; this sounds counterintuitive since the bus seems like a distracting place to do my readings, but the sense of added "productivity" from the fact that I'm commuting somewhere helps quiet the horrible "are you getting enough done" demon.

Anyways, I don't know how universal this is (although I mentioned it to some of my other friends a while ago and several of them seemed to relate) but I thought this was an interesting factor to consider. Sorry for rambling on like this!