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Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
This week:
- I describe one university’s systematic approach to shoring up students’ reading skills.
- Dan shares one reader’s strategies for forging connections to students.
- We pass along some dates for conferences and calls for proposals.
Building Reading Skills
Last month I wrote about how professors have targeted students’ reading problems within their courses. Some have created software that makes reading a social act; at the University of Texas at Austin, faculty members have redesigned a core English course. One reader asked me whether colleges had faced the issue more systematically, from the top down.
Provosts at the University of California at Santa Cruz — heads of the campus’s 10 residential colleges — told me they had done just that. After two years of planning, they have remade the required freshman curriculum that they oversee.
The new curriculum consists of a three-course sequence of reading and writing classes that replaces the previous writing-only core. One course, devoted solely to reading, was designed to help students parse different genres, strategies, and purposes for reading.
Some of the university’s professors were incredulous that college students would need such a course, said Jody Greene, Santa Cruz’s associate vice provost for teaching and learning. But instructors in the residential colleges were convinced the students needed more support in building those skills.
“Our students were lacking some fundamental skills in reading comprehension, reading analysis, and even in something as simple as having a conversation with someone else about a text,” Greene said.
Besides, tackling college-level work is an adjustment for freshmen. “You go from a history of reading newspaper articles and textbooks and novels, and you come to an institution, and you’re being given philosophy and journal articles and symbolic codes,” said Elizabeth S. Abrams, provost of Merrill College, a global-themed residential college, and a senior teaching professor in the university’s writing program. “How the hell do you read that stuff if you’ve never encountered it before?”
It was too much for one or two quarters of writing courses to handle. Writing instructors found themselves not only shoring up students’ reading skills, but also helping them acclimate to college-level instruction.
So the provosts designed a course made just for reading, called College 1, that would also teach an “academic ethos”: the sorts of critical reading, analysis, and self-efficacy skills required for college-level work.
That means exposing students to readings that conflict with one another, and devising assignments with lots of group work and introspection. Each residential college teaches its own version of the course, but shares the goals that students will “take risks in reading, writing, and discussion,” “foster cooperative and critical discussion,” and “respond productively to conflict.” In effect, the curriculum proposal said, students would learn how to face “fundamental questions, controversial topics, and unpopular ideas.”
Each college’s version of the course uses skills-based “readings about readings,” often academic articles meant to teach students analysis, critical thinking, metacognition, engagement with others, and self-efficacy. The college adds topical readings of its choice.
Students at Merrill College, for instance, focus on “exploring global identities and raising global consciousness,” by reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman; Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson’s legal memoir; and articles in The New York Times.
During the course, students work in groups and keep journals about their reading. When a text is especially challenging, instructors may assign a “difficulty paper” in which students lay out what they found confusing and try different ways to decipher the text.
“The point in that assignment is to move away from a kind of ‘jump to the solution’ approach to thinking,” Abrams said, “to appreciate the process of thinking, and where deep reading can take you.”
The provosts set goals for their students’ learning outcomes: About 85 percent of students, according to graded assessments, would learn new reading strategies to analyze texts, and would grasp the relationship between genres and their context.
Preliminary assessments suggest that American students met the first goal but fell a bit short of the second. (The provosts considered the 85-percent benchmark “really high for the first time this course is taught,” said Regina D. Langhout, a psychology professor and provost of Oakes College. “We’re going to need to focus on those who scored slightly lower on the campus writing-placement exam.”)
In addition, freshmen who completed the courses reported feeling greater self-efficacy and belonging — a trait that correlates with retention — than did freshmen who had taken the university’s standard first-year survey.
But the curriculum doesn’t seem equally effective for everyone. Students who matriculated with weaker writing scores reported learning more reading strategies than did higher-skilled students. International students, however, “didn’t do as well,” Langhout said. “We didn’t do as well teaching them.”
Some of the disparity is likely, Langhout said, because the assessments assumed some degree of familiarity with outside context — a domestic student is more familiar with the historical context of a James Baldwin essay, for example. The entire campus needs to do more to support international students, Langhout said, “because all of this isn’t going to happen just at the colleges.”
