How to Help Students Get the Most Out of Reading Assignments

In the perfect world, students would read the texts we carefully curate for them with equal attention and care. In reality, many students struggle with college-level readings, either giving up on challenging texts altogether or reading in ways that do not promote deep understanding or learning. We can help students get more out of course readings by boosting metacognitive awareness of how to read academic writing. How might we help students understand the structure of academic textbooks/journals/monographs? How can we prompt students to adjust their reading strategies to the text and task at hand? How do we guide them towards reading academic texts with a sense of purpose? The following four strategies can help students get the most out of course reading assignments, and find more confidence and enjoyment when reading academic texts: 

Teach basic academic literacy

Although we tend to assume otherwise, many of our students lack a basic understanding of how academic textbooks, monographs, or journals are structured—and many don’t have a clear sense of what these terms refer to in the first place (especially if they primarily interact with on-demand digital texts). Drawing students’ attention to paratextual features like tables of content or indexes can go a long way in helping them find the information they need and become more effective readers of academic texts. 

Require prereading

Many students who struggle with college-level texts do so because they launch into reading without sufficient preparation. Simple pre-reading exercises (“skim the chapter in four minutes to identify key terms,” “read the opening sentence of each section,” “guess the content of the article based on its subheadings,” “predict the argument by looking at the graphs/illustrations,” etc.) can help students grasp the big picture before attending to the details of a reading. In addition to quick pre-reading exercises, well-formulated guided reading questions (GRQs) can help focus student attention on key concepts and avoid getting bogged down (or discouraged) during the reading process.  

Introduce effective reading strategies

In her book Teach Students How to Learn, Saundra McGuire introduces a simple but effective method for helping students process challenging academic texts. She advises students to pause after each paragraph and restate its content in their own words. As students continue to read, they fold in the main point of each paragraph into subsequent paraphrases, creating a running account of the text’s unfolding meaning. This process might seem laborious and time-consuming, but McGuire’s students report that it paradoxically saves them time, as it allows them to follow the argument with understanding and eliminates the false starts and “going in circles” feeling that novices often experience when tackling expert-level writing.

Switch focus from “texts” to “tasks”

The traditional method of assigning readings is to give students a page range or chapter numbers and hope for the best. In a Faculty Focus podcast (episode 69) Norman Eng proposes refocusing reading assignments from an emphasis on the text to an emphasis on a task. For example, instead of simply assigning a chapter on theories of behaviorism for a psychology class, an instructor can give students a case study and ask them to analyze it using relevant theories found in the reading. Adding a sense of purpose (and relevance) can boost motivation, help students focus their reading efforts, and help connect the reading task to a broader learning context.