This week I want to focus on reading guides. A few professors wrote in to recommend this approach, which they say helps students take a more active and focused approach to assigned readings.
One of the best explanations of how reading guides are designed and used came from Justin Shaffer, associate dean of undergraduate studies and a teaching professor at the Colorado School of Mines. Shaffer has taught thousands of STEM students in subjects such as biology and biomedical engineering.
“I deeply care about students’ critical reading skills and try to promote it as much as I can via reading of textbooks, published papers, and other sources,” he wrote. “They need help though! To do this, I use reading guides, which are Word documents that I make to go along with the reading and they help students pull out the important information from the textbook or paper, thus enabling 1) them to be more focused and less overwhelmed with trying to figure out what is important and 2) me to be more transparent with my students for what I want them to learn — I always tell them, ‘I want to know what you know, not what you think I want you to know,’ and the reading guide is the first step at promoting transparency.”
Shaffer, who also conducts discipline-based education research, published a study on the efficacy of using reading guides. His study found that, using reading guides, most students finished their textbook assignment for class and that students who completed a single reading guide prior to class saw a 1- to 2-percent increase in exam grades.
I called Shaffer up to learn more about how and why he uses reading guides. He said he’s been a fan of this approach since he was a postdoc at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he worked with Kelly Hogan, who used a similar guided-reading approach, in an introductory biology course.
Why does he feel reading guides are necessary? Textbooks, Shaffer said, are not typically well written. They’re dense and encyclopedic. So it’s no wonder that students often struggle to extract the right information from them. Just saying “read chapter four” isn’t much help.
Reading guides, Shaffer believes, are a form of active learning. The professor isn’t doing the work for the student but instead asks a series of questions: Explain this concept in your own words. Fill out this table to compare and contrast two ideas. And so on. “It’s being really active,” he said. “It’s also very transparent. It helps students understand what I want them to know.”
When students arrive to class, he said, the professor can begin to apply the ideas they’ve read about in different ways instead of simply reviewing information that students may or may not have read. He has had students tell him they had to recalibrate their expectations for his classes and come prepared, because they quickly learned that otherwise they’d be behind.
That said, Shaffer makes the guides optional. If students feel they can perform well in his course without using them, that’s fine by him.
Shaffer also touched on something that I’ve heard other professors say: Too often instructors don’t expect students to do the reading, so they lecture to deliver content. That is demotivating for students. Why read the textbook when everything you need to know will be on PowerPoint slides? Perhaps reading guides could be the bridge between the reading and the learning that takes place in class.
Want to learn more about how reading guides work? You can find samples, including a template to create your own guide, on Shaffer’s website.
If you have insights or strategies around developing students’ reading skills and reading endurance, write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your ideas might appear in a future newsletter.
Students or customers?
Are there elements of the student-centered approach to education that harm students’ ability to learn and grow? Judging from what I’ve been hearing from some professors, there’s a fuzzy line on some campuses between being student-focused and treating students as a customer to be served.
I’ve written about the rise of student-conduct issues, in which students may expect their professors to be flexible beyond reason or won’t abide by traditional learning norms, like showing up regularly and on time to class. And students themselves are increasingly approaching higher education more as a product than a process.
This is a deeply complicated topic, which ties into other teaching challenges, such as the rise of mental-health issues, snowplow parenting, and political interference into the college curriculum. But it’s a part of modern higher education I want to explore in a series we’re producing on how today’s students experience the world — and how it affects their education.
If you have thoughts on this topic, please write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or fill out this Google form.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
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