Without reading well, students can’t write well. The two skills cannot be disentangled. Yet, in my writing courses, I’ve often lamented that students don’t seem to be completing or comprehending the reading assignments.
Why aren’t they reading? My colleagues Sarah Pedzinksi and Madeleine Gonin lay out five common barriers and some solutions in their post, “How can I support and encourage my students to complete course readings?” I wish I’d had those ideas when I started teaching!
Instead, I tried a couple of so-so approaches. In my in-person classes, I gave closed-book pop quizzes. I would pull up the questions and give students some time to write—on paper!—their responses. On the plus side, the quizzes pushed more students to read; on the minus, I disliked the policing undertone, and I had to decipher handwriting.
In my online courses, students wrote weekly discussion posts about the assigned chapter, which I marked complete/incomplete. This task seemed to motivate reading, and grading was relatively quick. Yet, I found it numbingly boring to read dozens of chapter summaries; students likely had a similar feeling about the posts (which, today, would be easily delegated to AI). Further, despite the “discussion forum” format, the bland prompts did little to inspire dialogue between classmates.
While these reading motivators were better than nothing, they didn’t do much to encourage evaluation, synthesis, or application—interpretive work that would make the texts meaningful to students and prepare them for our major projects.
If I could talk to my younger self, I would recommend that I do a bit of reading about helping students read. A great place to start is “Helping Students Read Mindfully Across the Disciplines,” chapter 7 of Engaging Ideas (2021, e-book available with IU credentials). Authors John Bean and Dan Melzer explain why the texts we assign can be a heavy lift for our undergraduates (spoiler alert: it’s not because they’re lazy!). To address these challenges, they propose over a dozen techniques to help students engage purposefully with your materials.
Some of these strategies take a mere ten minutes of class time: sharing your own reading methods or talking about dictionary use, for instance. Others can be assigned as homework. For example, through the “imagined interview with the author” assignment (pp. 156–157), students practice reading, writing, and critical thinking as they compose an “interview” with the author on a related issue. Personally, as a student, I loved this kind of creative assignment. It was fun to get into authors’ heads and emulate their writing styles—and because I found these tasks enjoyable, they coaxed me into slowing down and grappling with the readings’ ideas.
That kind of imaginative reading activity will work better for some contexts and learners than others. Students who might feel more motivated by peer interactions or structured tasks will benefit from social annotation. Annotating texts enables the reader to process and interpret, but it can feel like a lonely effort, and perhaps a wasted one if it’s not rewarded. Social annotation involves taking notes in conversation with classmates, posing and responding to questions and sharing reactions. IU instructors can assign the tool Hypothesis as an eText, allowing for fast grading of annotations. Or you can use free methods, e.g., asking students to add comments to a shared Word document.
Learn more at my upcoming workshop with Eric Brinkman, “Write Together to Read Better: Use Social Annotation to Increase Engagement” (February 14, 11:30 a.m., Wells Library and Zoom), and from Eric’s post, “Improving Student Reading Engagement (or How to Avoid Blank Stares).” Any time you’d like to talk more about the reading-writing connection, please reach out!
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