Reading

When instructors lament that their students are not willing to complete their reading assignments, they often cite their students' seeming inability to say anything sophisticated or critical about the reading as evidence for their claim. But does a student's underwhelming performance in class necessarily indicate that they did not do the reading? Or could it, instead, be a sign that such students are "reading" without knowing what they are supposed to be gleaning from the act?

The readings that we assign in our courses are shaped—often strongly—by disciplinary and/or generic conventions that may be unfamiliar, or even inscrutable, to some of our students. As such, it's entirely possible that our students are reading for completion without developing the kind of critical response to the reading that we would hope. Here are some steps that you can take to make sure that your students are reading with profit:

1. Query prior knowledge. At the start of the semester, briefly preview the kinds of materials that students will be reading, and make a point of highlighting the ways they may differ from the texts with which students may be most familiar (e.g. from their secondary school courses). Survey your students about the breadth of their reading. What degree(s) of preparation are your students bringing to the genres represented in your course? Have they read these kinds of materials before/recently? In addition to giving you and your teaching staff valuable background, a survey of this nature will alert your undergraduates to the fact that they may need to seek out support in reading certain genres of assigned texts during the semester.

2. Model expert reading. Presumably you are a good representative of the kind of reader you would like your students to be/become. So, show them how you read! You might do this in different ways:

   • Guide students through a close reading of a passage. You could do this synchronously, in class, by projecting or distributing a handout containing a representative passage and reading it out loud together, pausing to narrate aloud your inner monologue as you read. You might also do this asynchronously, by posting a video, or using annotation tools (see below). In either case, the goal is to model for students the hidden "moves" that an expert reader makes when confronting material in your field or discipline.

   • Use an online annotation tool. Harvard offers access to AnnotationsX and Perusall, which allow you and your students to comment directly on a shared text, to respond to each others’ annotations, and to reflect on your experience of reading in real time. This can be an occasion for modeling expert reading, or for diagnosing what your students already do and don’t know to look for.

3. Focus class discussions on form as well as content. When discussing readings in class, remember to emphasize how they work (i.e. as technologies of exposition and persuasion) as well as what they say. Literature courses aren't the only places where students can profit from close reading a text. Look for opportunities in the course of your lectures and class discussions to pause and take a deep dive into how a text is saying what it is saying. Are there certain rhetorical techniques an author employs to produce a desired effect in the reader? How have the authors of a scientific paper employed scale, color, and other graphic design choices to steer a reader toward their preferred interpretation of a figure?

Further down this page we'll suggest some ways that you can create "extrinsic motivation"—i.e. the carrots and sticks of grades and other incentives—for students who might otherwise lag on completing their reading assignments. A large body of research, however, appears to demonstrate the significantly superior effects of intrinsic motivation on student performance—that is to say, students' authentic desire to complete a task because it is enjoyable in itself and/or produces an outcome that the student genuinely values independent of the grade they receive. Here are a few ways you might try to activate (and grow) students' intrinsic motivation to complete your course reading:

1. Introduce upcoming assignments at the start of each unit. In theory, the reading that you ask students to complete should all be oriented towards preparing them for the "capstone" assessment that will mark the conclusion of a certain unit within your course. Rather than lay out the course chronologically on your syllabus, you might try framing each unit by putting its culminating assessment upfront, and explaining how the reading within the unit will contribute to it. (e.g. "Unit 3: Calculating your Carbon Footprint. At the end of this 2-week segment of the course, you will be asked to complete an assignment in which you…. In order to prepare you for this assignment, you will read several scientific papers explaining this method of … .") By helping students recognize that the reading is not busywork, but is, in fact, part of a carefully constructed training plan designed to improve their abilities, you will kindle their motivation.

2. Pose framing questions. In the real world, no one reads a text "just because" (well, unless you're in the dentist's waiting room!). Rather, we read because we have a question we are burning to answer, and we suspect that the text in front of us will help us find that answer. So help to create those conditions for your students: pose a few reading questions on the syllabus, or in a Canvas discussion forum, and let students know that the assigned texts will help students formulate an answer. Just make sure that the questions you pose are genuinely interesting—i.e. that they transcend mere factual questions that can be hunted down by skimming. One way to do this is to orient the questions towards students' own lives and experiences. (e.g. "Which author's description of grief rings more true to your own experience of loss?")

As noted in the previous section, there are also ways of creating extrinsic motivation for students to complete reading assignments. While less effective than intrinsic motivation, "artificial" incentives and prods often do work well enough to get students started on the reading, at which point they may become more intrinsically motivated. Here are a few ways you might try to deploy extrinsic motivators to nudge students toward completing your course reading:

1. Make students responsible to each other. As much as students may dislike disappointing their instructors, they are even more loath to let each other down. Consider finding ways to make reading into a communal activity, in which your students depend on each other's diligence. You might do this in different ways:

   • Assign students different reading "roles." Ask one or more students to focus exclusively on identifying the author's argument, or spotting metaphors, or defining terms, or retracing evidence, etc. as they read; upon arriving in the classroom, each student (or small group of students) will be responsible for teaching their classmates about the patterns they've isolated.

   • Crowdsource a glossary. Have students each identify three or five words that they believe the author is using as terms. These may be clear examples of jargon, or just common words which seem to take on the importance of terms for a particular author. Ask the students to submit their terms, with accompanying definitions, to a Google Doc or wiki on the course Canvas site prior to class each week.

2. Institute reading quizzes—but make sure they're oriented towards learning. Though quizzes may not be overwhelmingly popular, the research pretty clearly demonstrates that they are the most effective way to make sure that students retain information over the long term. If you do elect to assign weekly reading quizzes, we suggest that you take pains to avoid the "gotcha" modality of quiz (e.g. pop quizzes in class, or Canvas quizzes that may only be taken once), as these quizzes do little more than alert students to the fact that they haven't learned something. Instead, set up a Canvas quiz that students not only may, but have to, take as many times as they need to in order to earn 100%. In this way you can be sure that the quiz has a teaching function rather than a measuring and sorting one.

3. Go beyond the text. Students may enjoy reading a text more if they know that they will be invited to do something applied and/or creative with it, too. Here are some ways you can authorize students to do something that they may perceive as creative and fun, as well as intellectually meaningful, with a reading:

   • Have students perform an act of translation. Are your students reading a poem, or novel? Ask them to stage (or describe how they would stage) a scene from the text if they were to adapt it for a movie. Or are they reading a scientific paper? Ask them how they would transform it into an infographic or poster presentation at a conference. The choices that students make—what would be the light source in this staged scene? How would we convert this table of data into a map with more visual interest?—will give you direct insight into how well your students have understood what was happening in the original text.

   • Have students spot an example of a concept "in the wild." Can your students find an illustration of a concept from their reading out in the "real world"? There is no quicker way to see whether your students have understood a concept like irony, for example, than to ask them to bring you a film clip from YouTube that they believe illustrates irony.