Professors and students have contradictory views of course reading. Professors believe that reading outside of the classroom is essential in optimizing learning. However, students often find the readings to be time-consuming, not necessary to pass the class, and an option rather than a requirement. We surveyed 449 undergraduate university students…

While educators believe reading is an investment in learning and knowing, what many are not considering is what reading analytically means to civic life in the digital age when many of the old gatekeepers of traditional publishing are disappearing. As new voices have emerged, and there is an explosion of reading material, there is also less…

Synthesizing theory from literacy scholars with strategies derived from classroom inquiry projects, "Rethinking Reading in College" argues for more--and more systematic--attention to the role of reading comprehension in college as a necessary step in addressing the inequities in student achievement that otherwise increase over time.…

Though practitioners in Basic Writing studies often refer to "the politics of remediation," there are few pedagogical models that address how to teach this facet of professional life to graduate students and emerging professionals. Most often, this knowledge is transmitted through storytelling, namely narrative-based accounts of Basic…

The transition from high school to college is challenging for many students, especially first-generation college students. College courses require disciplinary specific reading, writing, and thinking skills not often taught in high school, such as reading and analyzing complex texts and constructing original arguments in discipline-specific…

Many students, particularly underprepared students, struggle to identify the essential information in empirical articles. We describe a set of assignments for instructing general psychology students to dissect the structure of such articles. Students in General Psychology I read empirical articles and answered a set of general, factual questions…

Encouraging undergraduate students to access, read, and analyze current primary literature can positively impact learning, especially in advanced courses. The incorporation of literature into coursework typically involves reading and responding to full research reports. Such exercises have clear value as students make connections between…

The arrival of the Common Core State Standards changed the landscape of teacher preparation for many teacher education programs by highlighting the importance of growing students as readers, writers, and communicators. This study focuses on the instructional literacy practices of preservice teachers enrolled in a co-taught course with a literacy…

The literature reveals that no adequate instrument exists to measure college students' attitudes toward academic reading even though such attitudes are crucial for reading compliance and learning from text. To remedy this, the authors created and refined an attitude survey, administering it to 855 university students across four iterations. The…

We have incorporated an active-learning assignment, Reading Papers Using Key Sentences, in an upper-level Introduction to Chemical Research course. Although key sentences are typically used to help authors write with clarity and organization, we have found that this assignment helps students improve upon and practice reading journal articles for…

A common source of frustration for college instructors is getting their students to read. Since the 1970s, studies have shown that no more than 30 percent of students complete a reading assignment on any given day. But what can be done? What strategies can instructors use to make certain that their students read? Do pop or announced quizzes work…

In this paper, we report on the impact of four activities and two interviews on the organization of an introductory statistics course attended by future mathematics teachers at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The activities were designed to enhance students' learning and collaborative knowledge construction, based on Vygotsky's…