Want Students to Do the Reading? Assign Tasks, Not Texts

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 much (Deale & Lee, 2022; Hoeft, 2012). Maybe it’s time we stop assigning readings. Perhaps we should instead start assigning tasks.