Maybe it’s just me, but my students seem to be reading less for their classes than they were even a few years ago. Beyond such personal musings and a lot of academic griping on this topic, there’s a dearth of recent empirical data on how
“I spent hours on the Gulliver’s Travels reading—yes, hours—and I still didn’t get through the Lilliput section!” my student, Sarah, bemoaned after class one morning. I asked her to walk me through her approach.
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
In today’s Google Search world, many students are used to simply typing a question into their browser and looking at whatever pops up on the screen. As a result, they struggle with finding good resources through their library databases. Refining a search and discerning which
A new survey documents what most teachers already know: students don’t devote much time to their course-assigned readings (Sharma, Van Hoof, & Ramsay, 2019). And that’s not counting students who are doing their very best to get through a course without reading. In this survey,
I’ve found another interesting study of students and reading which dovetails nicely with the research referenced in the July 25, 2012 post. I’m thinking that as the new academic year begins and readings are being selected and assigned, it’s beneficial to keep thinking about student
