Getting students to do the reading is a perennial challenge. In their journal article College students’ textbook reading, or not!, Kylie Baier et al found that "62% of students spend an hour or less reading their assigned materials" and "40.8% of the participants indicated they did their reading only when preparing for exams." Clearly there is work to be done in this area by every instructor. Following are some methods that have been shown to work through research and/or experience.

Foundation: Explicit Connections to Readings

The Baier et al research had another disturbing finding: "89% of students believed they could receive a C or better without completing any of the assigned readings." Clearly assigning reading and assuming learning is a problematic approach.

Many faculty writing about and researching reading engagement share one common recommendation: making explicit connections to readings in lectures, activities, assessments, and discussions. Students in the Baier research strongly preferred that "(a) instructors review the assigned class readings, (b) speak regularly about the readings, and (c) discuss the important points from the readings."

If a student doesn't know why the reading is valuable, how it connects to the class activities and assessments, and doesn't see the reading referenced and used, why would we expect them to do it?

As Tiffany F. Culver and Linda W. Morse put it in Helping Students Use Their Textbooks More Effectively (not just limited to textbooks), Use the text in class. This means, as they put it:

"In your lectures or group work,refer to charts, specific studies, or interesting points in the text. Place reminders about reading on your course Webpages. This connects you and your students with the text.If you disagree with a text, make it clear to the students why and how your position differs. When your lectures digress from the text, make that clear as well, and communicate your reasoning. Students need to know that the instructor has read the text and is familiar with its view points and examples."

Foundation: Student Readiness

Instructors commonly assume that students have the appropriate skills to read actively and study effectively. This is quite often an inaccurate assumption, even at the graduate school level!

Maryellen Weimer, in Still More on Developing Reading Skills, observes that, when assigned readings, students can "feel they have met their obligation if they have forced their eyes to ‘touch’ (in appropriate sequence) each word on the pages assigned." And Weimer rightly goes on to note that reading and study skills "are not explicitly taught at any level of education. Sophisticated learners (like faculty) discover them through a trial-and-error process, but most students in college courses today are not developing these reading comprehension skills."

Explicitly addressing these needs is critical to student success. Weimer suggests strategies including demonstrating and then having students do things like:

  • highlight and annotate the readings,
  • capture five questions about the reading and answer two, sharing these in some way with the class,
  • create graphic organizers, charts or lists, or
  • keep a reading response journal.

In Text Highlighting: Helping Students Understand What They Read, Lydia Conca expands on the first idea to include sharing annotations as a way for her to see what students do and understand, using that as a starting point for discussions and enrichment. Shared online annotation tools like hypothes.is make these, and other sophisticated shard and collaborative annotation methods possible for online texts and pages of all kinds.

Strategies

Visuals, Concept Maps, and Infographics

I, and others I have worked with, have had great success with an amplification of one of Weimer's suggestions: having students create visuals that demonstrate the ability to summarize or synthesize a reading. Such visual approaches include graphic organizers, concept maps, and infographics.

Announced Reading Quizzes

In their article Increasing Reading Compliance of Undergraduates: An Evaluation of Compliance Methods, Sarah J. Hatteberg and Kody Steffy
 compared the outcomes of seven different methods of promoting reading engagement and found three clear leaders in effectiveness, the first of which was good old fashioned quizzes.  Research is only as good as the definition of what is measured, leaving plenty of room for debate about what "effective" means, but the results here were pretty clear.

Contrary to common belief, pop quizzes (and calling on students randomly) yielded distinctly lower results than announced quizzes.

Just In Time Quizzes

Professor Jay Howard improved engagement in his class using Just-in-Time Quizzes. These quizzes administered in the LMS, and due no later than two hours before class starts, have only to questions: a well-designed multiple choice question that "would force students to consider some of the evidence in each selection that challenges conventional wisdom," and a short answer question designed to require students to "summarize or synthesize information from the reading." Even if your class doesn't have required synchronous sessions, such a strategy is easily applied in fully asynchronous classes as well.

Readiness Assessment Tests

A variation on pre-assessment might be even more effective. In their paper Readiness Assessment Tests versus Frequent Quizzes:Student Preferences, Weinstein & Wu show that Readiness Assessment Tests (RATs), posing 2-3 open-ended questions not readily answered by skimming the text and that "required students to respond to questions about the assigned readings prior to class discussion," were generally more effective than frequent quizzes that used multiple-choice and true/false questions. But, as with methods discussed next, instructor labor is a factor: frequent quizzes had an appreciable positive result while being far less demanding on the instructor.

Reading Guides

Another strategy successfully employed by Hatteberg & Steffy were mandatory reading guides (the "mandatory" adjective is important; optional reading guides were significantly less effective). A reading guide is a document with prompts and questions that guide a student in recognizing and understanding the important ideas in a reading, provides quick checks of their understanding, and promotes active reading through engagement with ideas and questions requiring summary and synthesis.

Research by Diane P. Armstrong et al showed not only an increase in attention and comprehension of the texts with reading guides but also an increase in comprehension on subsequent reading tasks without guides. Research by Trent W. Maurer and Judith Longfield further showed that reading guides, with or without quizzes about the text, showed large improvements in comprehension and performance.

Maurer and Longfield noted that each reading guide, in which "all questions [...] were organized in the order that students would encounter the answers in the text and contained a specific page number or numbers where the answers to that question could be located," took the faculty about two hours to create.

MARSI Reading Inventory

Use the Metacognitive Awareness of Reading Strategies Inventory (survey) [PDF]. This relatively. As the creators of the inventory, Kouider Mokhtari and Carla Reichard, discuss in their research article, the MARSI instrument isn't intended to be a comprehensive measure, but a tool that can be valuable in two ways:

  • it "enables students to increase awareness of their own reading strategies," which aids them in "achieving the type of constructively respon-sive and thoughtful reading," among other benefits noted in the article has multiple benefits in and of itself, and

     
  • it provides students with "a useful means of assessing, monitoring, and documenting the type and number of the reading strategies used by students," providing points to address through the remediation and enrichment.

3-2-1 Method

In her article "The Little Assignment with the Big Impact: Reading, Writing, Critical Reflection, and Meaningful Discussion," Geraldine Van Gyn shares her simple "3-2-1" method, which has three parts:

  1. students read,
  2. students identify and discuss two points from the reading they don't understand, and
  3. students pose a question to the text's author that goes "beyond the reading content and does not reflect the areas of confusion" shared in step #2.

The article provides more details for implementing the "3-2-1" method, but providing a framework for structured inquiry can be a powerful way to promote reading engagement!