Why aren’t your students doing the assigned reading? This year, that question has stumped faculty members across higher education. As people who have dedicated large chunks of our lives to books, we can’t fathom why students aren’t reading: Why wouldn’t they want to put their best foot forward in class? Why wouldn’t they feel some intrinsic motivation to open their minds through reading?
As a faculty-development expert, I’ve been hearing academics fret about this for months. The most common refrains:
- It’s difficult to teach content when students don’t prioritize reading.
- And it’s insulting to spend time and energy carefully selecting texts for a course, only to have them go unread.
As an instructor myself, I empathize. Puzzled by your students’ seeming indifference, you may vacillate between blaming them and wondering what you’re doing wrong. But students’ not completing the course reading isn’t necessarily a personal attack on your teaching or your choice of texts. In fact, many of the reasons that students don’t read have to do with environmental and personal factors, not the instructor.
What do we know about the decline of reading? A recent Chronicle story, “Is This the End of Reading?,” found that undergraduates are “coming to college less able and less willing to read.” Among the root causes:
- We stop teaching the subject too soon. Reading is taught as a fundamental skill in the early years of elementary school but after that point is less and less developed. In assigning tasks that require higher-order thinking, high-school and college teachers assume students know how to read actively, think critically about the material, and formulate questions and critiques. For many students, that just isn’t the case. Reading needs to be foundationally introduced, then reinforced through lots of practice. Various methods of reading comprehension (outlining, note taking, analysis, peer editing, reading aloud, etc.) should build flexibility and agility. Too often, we’re dropping the ball both on building the foundations in K-12 and reinforcing them in college classrooms.
- Digital distractions are hard to escape. In 2024, the average household has 17 screens, and that includes tablets, TVs, computers, and cell phones. Students are streaming, scrolling, and watching — a lot. Amid those distractions, only 20 percent of teenagers report reading for pleasure. Most reading is done for class (if at all) and seen only as a mandatory school activity. Practice makes perfect, so if there is no practice at home, the activity becomes harder within the confines of the classroom.
- The pandemic hangover continues. During Covid, faculty members relaxed academic standards that we had worked hard to put in place. We changed grading to pass/fail, excused irregular attendance, required students to do less for a good grade. Course expectations became suggestions. Returning to “normal” has proved not only difficult, but unrealistic. Students’ experiences during Covid trained them to think that (a) grade inflation would win out over effort or accountability, and (b) doing the reading is optional, not integral.
- AI is already affecting how much they read. I’d be remiss not to mention how generative AI has affected reading skills, both positively and negatively. On the plus side, faculty members can devise activities that encourage students to use AI as an enhancement to reading, not a replacement. On the negative side, unless we hold students directly accountable for the reading, at least some of them will take the easy path and ask AI for a synopsis or to pull quotes from a text they never bothered to read.
What Can Instructors Do?
If you feel overwhelmed by such obstacles, join the club. But with a little ingenuity, patience, and determination, you can change the way you shape reading assignments, reinvigorate your students’ intrinsic motivation to read, and advance your pedagogy along the way.
Reconsider your readings and explain your choices. Before classes resume in the fall, take some time to assess the reading skills necessary to successfully complete your course assignments. Break down reading tasks into their lowest common denominator. Are there any skills — active reading, outlining, note-taking, analyzing, evaluating, meaning-making — you could reinforce early in the semester to model your expectations?
Revisit your course readings with an eye on their length, accessibility, diversity, and cost. Avoid the temptation to assign a reading because you liked the text, wrote the text, or found it personally valuable. Only select readings that help achieve the learning outcomes and objectives you’ve listed on your syllabus. If a certain text is particularly dense, long, outdated, or expensive, think about jettisoning it.
What to try: Craft a paragraph on your syllabus (and post it on your course web page) dedicated to your expectations for reading and the value it will bring the students academically and professionally. Make your case on paper and on the first day of class for why the assigned reading is essential, not optional or transactional (i.e., “moving beyond reading for context will prepare you for a seat at the table in your field, cultivate insights for business proposals, or prepare your for both sides of an argument with fluidity and agility”). Some ideas that have worked for me and other instructors:
- Students value understanding why texts were selected and what a reading will do for their current and future learning. Explain the rationale behind each of your selections, both on the syllabus and on the first day of class.
- Talk about how and why you plan to hold students accountable for doing the reading.
- Consider not assigning other homework on days when you are asking students to do a significant amount of reading or prepare for a reading activity, as doing so will increase the likelihood of completion.
- Whatever expectations are set, stick to them throughout the term.
- Teach skills associated with reading well. For example, if you want students to be able to challenge authors’ viewpoints, take time in class to show how to do that. Or, if you want them to annotate journal articles, model it and provide practice opportunities in class before sending them out on their own.
Give students options. Choice stimulates a student’s natural motivation to engage with the course material. Find readings that make your content relevant to students’ lives. Plenty of instructors may bristle at that: I’m not suggesting that every text on your list pass the relevancy test — but some of them should. Students are far more likely to do the reading if (a) they see some connection in the material to their lives/futures and (b) it’s easily accessible via links, PDFs, rental options, and library copies.
What to try: Instead of picking all of the readings yourself, assign one evergreen text, and then give students a choice among additional short, relevant texts that align with course content. Some ideas:
- If you can’t get away from using a big, pricey textbook, ensure you assign chapters in manageable chunks, supplemented with real-world examples and news stories. You’re looking for short, snackable content that illustrates course frameworks, theories, and concepts.
- At a few points during the semester, adapt “Genius Hour” — an approach that allows students to explore their own passions and creativity — to your reading activities. Provide guidance around goals for the reading, and permit students to select from a prepopulated list of texts or to choose their own entirely. Assign students to integrate their chosen readings into homework assignments, make a presentation, or post about them on the class discussion board. Allow students to choose the format in which they do the reading (audiobook, podcast, YouTube, etc.).
- For the readings you select, help students make connections. Ask them to debate passages, synthesize key themes, or write essays reflecting on the relevance of the text to their future careers or lives. In writing assignments or class discussions, have students share personal experiences illuminated by the text.
Make your assignments about more than reading. Behaviors around reading are tied to both experience and emotions. To effectively change hearts and minds about the task, we need to make it cool to care about reading.
What to try: Choosing to assign relatable topics and align course content with what is happening in their lives is one way to do it. Another way is to make the completion of reading a leadership opportunity for students. Then it becomes a little risky for them to not do the reading because that would mean letting down their peers. A few options:
- The provoker activity is one of my favorites in this vein. You assign one or two students to lead discussions on the readings. They prepare areas of inquiry, dissent, and uncertainty; call on students; and keep the conversation flowing for the allocated time. As the instructor, you act as an observer and enter the discussion only toward the end to produce overarching ideas and patterns, correct misinterpretations, and provide key takeaways.
- Have students take turns leading question-formulation groups. Divide up the students and give each group a prompt about the reading (an image, a quote, a statistic, a comparison, a thought, etc.). The groups come up with as many open and closed questions as possible related to the prompt, then prioritize their “top” questions and pose them to other groups in a classwide discussion. Again, you take a backseat, observing and connecting the dots.
- Organize book clubs. Assign students to small book groups at the start of the term. Every few chapters, each book club meets (in person or virtually) to discuss the material. Students take turns leading the meetings.
- Assign students to propose ideas and insights from the readings to help solve a real-world business problem for a simulated client. Students have to come to the “meeting” (class) prepared to share, discuss, and defend their thoughts. To take the idea up a notch, act as the CEO of the session.
- Invite the authors of some of the assigned readings to class for a discussion. Have the students prepare questions and/or provide the authors with directives for discussing their work in a case-study format. Meeting authors of the texts humanizes the work and helps students value the content through a different lens.
Put AI to good use. With reading assignments, AI can be a game-changer. It can help students define unfamiliar terms, dissect difficult passages, and provide real-world applications. That said, as we all know, the slope is slippery between students’ appropriately using an AI tool to assist their learning versus taking liberties that you did not intend.
On your syllabus, be explicit about how you and students will employ AI tools in the classroom (use phrasing like “to complement or enhance the reading experience” or “to provide additional support in your academic-reading endeavors”). Detail what’s allowed and what’s not, and what can happen if students misuse ChatGPT and violate academic-honesty rules. It’s imperative that your course policy meets the AI guidelines set by your institution or department, and that you set up guardrails to hold students accountable.
What to try: The more we prohibit or police AI, the more students will use it in ways that harm their learning. So why not make the best of it? Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Play against the technology. Ask AI to answer questions on the reading. Give students a rubric to “grade” AI’s answers and then give feedback on its output.
- Ask an AI tool to answer questions as if it was the author of the text (for example, “Can you answer questions like Shakespeare?”). Students can “interview” authors from great works and turn the responses into an essay.
- Allow students to use AI to create an outline for an essay assignment based on the readings. Have peer groups assess the outlines.
Will these ideas completely solve the reading problem? I can’t promise that. Here’s what I can promise: Even doing just a few of these exercises will help shift the perception of reading in your classroom from an afterthought and a drag, to a meaningful and (dare I say) fun component of their learning.
