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, more than 1,100 students enrolled in five general education courses and taking an average of 17 credits reported reading for only 7.52 hours per week. That’s 30 minutes per week per credit, or 90 minutes for a three-credit course. The students who are reading more than the average are earning higher grades—also not a surprise, but it’s good to have this confirmed.
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At the end of each lecture, I post on the board a study plan for the material I covered that day. The plan includes textbook sections and a set of retrieval practice questions on Quizlet. I am assuming that students benefit from a second run through the material from the textbook author’s perspective before tackling retrieval practice. Is my assumption correct? Just wondering.