Creating Terrific Readers through Terrible Drawings
Nichole DeWall
July 14, 2025
Could doodles, sketches, and stick figures help to keep the college reading apocalypse at bay?
Could doodles, sketches, and stick figures help to keep the college reading apocalypse at bay?
My course is literally about teaching reading to young children, a challenge given that research suggests that college students complete only 20–30 percent of assigned readings, a behavior inversely related to academic performance and engagement (Kerr & Frese, 2017; Deale & Lee, 2021). Further exacerbating
I didn’t always offer full-throated endorsements of audiobooks in my literature courses. Maybe that’s because I’m not really an audiobook person. Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve always preferred to engage in real reading than outsource the job to some random celebrity voice actor.
If we’re to believe the conversations around higher education’s proverbial water cooler, our students are coming to us with poorly developed reading skills and are less prepared and willing to tackle college-level reading assignments than perhaps ever before. The Chronicle of Higher Education has published
Many of us would like to assume that students who complete an assigned reading must thereby understand it. But students often get far less out of a reading than we might hope. For one, students lack the background understanding in the field that plays a
Evidence shows what many faculty already know: that many students are not doing the assigned readings for their classes. The numbers are striking. Today’s college student spends an average of six to seven hours per week on assigned readings, down from 24 hours in
One of the most frustrating things that can happen in higher education is that we assign students a reading that is really interesting and important for an upcoming class discussion. We then go on to design the day’s activities around the reading so that students
A lot of professors assign readings as follows: students read a piece of text, respond to it in some way, and come prepared to discuss it in class. Yet over half of students don’t do the assigned readings, and often it’s because professors assign too
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