college-level reading Archives

Three Teachers, One Challenge: Improving Student Engagement with Course Readings

Lonna Summers Rocha, Carrie L. La Voy, and Steven H. White February 16, 2026

We often hear faculty complain that students are not reading the course material. Studies consistently report low rates of reading compliance across disciplines, with students citing time pressures, unclear purpose, perceived irrelevance, and weak accountability structures as reasons for skipping assigned materials (Hoeft, 2012; Brost

Centering Student Literacy: Facing Reading Challenges Head-On

Stephanie Alexander November 11, 2024

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

Interactive Reading for Improved Learning

John Orlando February 1, 2022

As teachers, we would like to believe that when students do the assigned reading, they will understand the content it covers and so can be tested on it or given new information that builds on that understanding. When students do not demonstrate understanding of a

Increasing Reading Comprehension and Student Engagement, Face-to-Face and Online

Gayle Sollfrank and Jo Clemmons January 4, 2021

Now that many of us have moved to a hybrid or online format, the conversation around student-to-content and student-to-student engagement has taken on a new level of significance and intention. We have developed a reading graphic organizer (RGO) that increases students’ reading comprehension, assesses their

Reading to Learn

Neil Haave February 1, 2018

For some time now, students in my first-year biology course have been protesting that I’m assigning too much pre-class reading. I use the flipped classroom structure in most of my courses and that means students prepare for class by reading assigned pages in the textbook.

Reading Assignments, Activities, and Approaches to Promote Learning

Maryellen Weimer June 1, 2017

A collection of resources on getting students to read what’s assigned and strategies for developing college-level reading skills

Many students do not arrive in our courses with college-level reading skills. That usually ends up meaning a couple of things. First off, they

Lost in a Sea of Yellow: Teaching Students a Better Way to Highlight

Maryellen Weimer May 6, 2015

A lot of students are in love with their highlighters, especially those bright, fluorescent-colored ones. They use them to highlight course materials, sometimes underlining whole pages of text. When I first saw a text so fluorescent that it all but glowed, I wondered why in

college-level reading