How to Improve Student Comprehension of Difficult Texts

Credit: iStock/Nuttawan Jayawan
Credit: iStock/Nuttawan Jayawan
When students come to class without understanding the assigned reading, I often assume that they didn’t do it. While this can be the case, I have also found that many students simply didn’t get the needed information out of the assigned texts. Being an expert in the field, I have the background context needed to understand the text, but students lack this context, and my inability to see that is a classic example of the expert blind spot. But there are some steps that instructors can take to help students read difficult texts.

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