How to Make Sure Students Are Reading
Gooblar suggests starting past making sure that the assigned reading is really necessary. Students prioritize their work and won't bother with the reading if they feel it is not essential. Make sure that your required reading aligns with course objectives and can be completed in a reasonable amount of time. Show students that the reading is, indeed, necessary. At the end of class preview the upcoming reading assignment, explain how information technology fits into the material to be covered in the next class, and give the students some questions to consider as they do the reading.
Handouts created for the students can be useful, Gooblar writes. These can exist specific to each reading assignment or more full general to be used for all the readings. Questions posed in handouts assist prepare students for in-form discussion. Finish by request "What i question would you similar me to respond in grade about the reading?" Instead of a quiz, create a questionnaire to gauge problems students are having with the reading. "By asking questions that point to the use you'll make of the reading, you'll underline the fact that the reading is indeed integral to the course. You'll also provide yourself with useful information to guide your lecture or grade discussion." These questionnaires tin be used to monitor students' completion of the reading.
Finally, Gooblar advises making apply of the information from the reading assignments in course without repeating it in detail. Why should students spend their time reading if you lot are going to tell them what they need to know? You want the reading to serve equally a foundation for in-class word or use lecture time to build on the ideas presented in the reading.
A special report from Faculty Focus on Pedagogy offers 11 Strategies for Getting Students to Read What'due south Assigned [Magna Publications, July 2010]. I've summarized the master point(south) of each i subsequently the championship, but the articles are all brusque, so information technology won't accept long to review the total report.
- Enhancing Students' Readiness to Larn: Being explicit with your students about expectations [concerning the reading assignments] and assessing their preparedness improves motivation and learning outcomes
- What Textbook Reading Teaches Students: Make sure your students understand why you are assigning textbook readings and how it relates to other grade content. Don't repeat the exact information in class and thus brand information technology easy for students to skip the reading.
- Getting Students to Read: Design your class so that students must do the reading to practice well. Create assignments that crave more than than passive reading, structuring these and then that students must appoint with and respond to the reading.
- Helping Students Use Their Textbooks More Effectively: Suggestions in this article include giving explicit requirements, introducing the text in class, and offering students effective textbook study practices.
- Still More than on Developing Reading Skills: Quizzing is not an effective motivator for students to complete reading assignments and may encourage surface reading. Assignments, such equally reading responses, that structure reading for the students work better.
- Text Highlighting: Helping Students Understand What They Read: Have students bring highlighted/annotated/underlined texts to class and share their reasons for the markup. "In this mode, the types of thinking that accompanies purposeful, active reading go more apparent."
- When Students Don't Do the Reading: Students won't read if they know that the textile will be closely reviewed during lecture. Let students know that the reading is necessary background that will be referenced and built on.
- Pre-Reading Strategies: Connecting Expert Understanding and Novice Learning: Examples of scaffolding or structuring the reading experience for students, particularly underclassmen, by building a framework for topics, giving them reading strategies, making connections to the course content, identifying roadblocks to agreement, and uncovering the structure of the statement presented.
- The Utilize of Reading Lists: The article looks at a British report on how students tin can be motivated to read exterior of required texts for a course. The answer lies in taking time to develop student reading skills and raising interesting, challenging questions whose answers are to be found in the readings.
- The Student-Accessible Reading List: Structured and discussion-specific lists (of non-required texts) with a limited number of readings are more accessible to students. Annotations directly students to readings that will be useful to them.
- How to Get Your Students to Read What's Assigned: The terminal commodity provides a nice summary of ideas. Introduce the textbook and encourage use of supplemental materials the textbook provides, identify discipline-specific terminology, have students marker-up readings, construction the reading by providing questions to be answered alee of course, employ the textbook in class to emphasize its importance, teach students to enquire questions nigh the reading, link the reading to exams, and identify and work with students who need help with reading.
Faculty I talked with pointed out that students coming into colleges and universities today may be less prepared to take on reading assignments than in the past. In high schools today many students are being taught to the test and may exist associating reading with learning facts, which frequently means reading on the surface without understanding the big pic. If yous teach a form that relies heavily on reading assignments, consider taking time at the beginning of the semester to provide some in-class training on the best practices and strategies that your students should adopt. Accept the students scan a text, skimming the abstract or first paragraphs and determination, noting the section headings, illustrations and or graphics. Based on this preview, take them frame several questions that they have about the content, before they do a thorough reading. Discuss the value of taking notes and what those notes should embrace. Ask them what they highlight when they read and why. Remind your students that they should be bringing questions to class about their reading assignments.
If you have a solution that you've used to encourage students to practice the reading, please share it with us in the comments.
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Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resource
Image source: Pixabay.com
Source: https://ii.library.jhu.edu/2016/04/01/how-do-you-get-your-students-to-do-the-assigned-reading/
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