One of the communities I belong to is the community of professors in higher education. And one of the problems this community faces is the fact that students often don\u2019t read the things we assign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is actually a more complicated question to answer than it seems at first. It probably depends quite a bit on the things assigned in a course. Students might not read chapters from a textbook in an economics course, but that might not hinder their learning. I tend to think that if students aren\u2019t reading a textbook, it\u2019s probably because the professor is lecturing on the same material and they don\u2019t think they need to read the textbook. And maybe that is actually true in the case of economics or microbiology or something like that. There are concepts they need to understand, and the reading is meant to help them understand them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I need to clarify that I\u2019m specifically interested in the fact that students don\u2019t read the creative works that I assign in my literature courses. There’s a pretty significant difference between literature and a typical textbook. When someone reads a creative work like a novel, or a short story, or a poem, or even watches a film, they\u2019re going to have a unique experience because of the way story (narrative) functions. I want my students to actually read the literature I assign rather than skipping the experience by looking for a summary or relying on what can be gleaned from class discussion. Everyone will experience a story differently and the experience is skipped if you don’t actually read. Imagine shared fake photos from a vacation they never took. That seems a little bit like pretending to read literature when you haven\u2019t actually read it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, now I know I\u2019m dealing specifically with the fact that students don\u2019t always read literature that I assign. What are some of the parts of this problem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some students might want to read, but might not be able to find quiet time or space to really get it done. For these students, I want to encourage making time for reading (that is, thinking of it as a leisure activity instead of homework) and I also want to encourage reading in all sorts of different formats. Audiobooks make it possible to read while driving or doing chores, reading on a cell phone also makes it possible to read on the go. This is something I want to encourage and one way of doing this is to track what students are reading, when they’re reading, and how they\u2019re reading. I want to create a visualization of this data that can grow each semester (and I want more faculty than just me to invite their students to share data so the visualization can get more and more representative of the students population).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One obvious component of this problem is that fact that some students aren\u2019t interested in the class and therefore aren\u2019t genuinely motivated to read. I wrote about this last week in a blog post for a literature course I\u2019m teaching<\/a>. In it, I explain all of the ways I\u2019ve tried to encourage students to read. Ultimately, though, each strategy can’t solve the issue of students who are not genuinely interested. And it turns out it\u2019s really hard to be interested in something you didn\u2019t choose. This realization comes from Angus Fletcher, an English professor at Ohio State whose book, Wonderworks<\/a><\/em>, has led to a big breakthrough in my thinking on this issue. Maybe the problem is that students don’t want to read things that are assigned.<\/em><\/strong> Fletcher explains a lot of his main ideas from the book when interviewed for this podcast: <\/p>\n\n\n\n