Reading or not

Behind the Chronicle of Higher Education paywall, Steven Johnson’s report on “The Fall, and Rise, of Reading” in college courses. A few highlights (quotations from Johnson, not from his sources):

~ The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have risen since the 1990s, while twelfth-grade scores have fallen. Only thirty-seven percent of high-school seniors “graduate with ‘‘proficiency’ in reading, meaning they can read a text for both its literal and its inferential meanings.”

~ The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports that the average seventeen-year-old reads less for school than the average nine-year-old.

~ The ACT reports that in 2005, only half of high-school graduates were prepared for college-level reading. Yet sixty-two percent of students were on track to be prepared when they were in eighth and tenth grade.

~ The National Survey of Student Engagement reports than “the average college student in the United States spends six to seven hours a week on assigned reading.” In the mid-twentieth century, it was twenty-four hours a week.

~ A study from 2000 of 910 college students found that twenty percent of students made a habit of doing the reading for their classes. Sixteen years earlier it was eighty percent.

There’s the fall. As for the rise: Johnson examines several strategies to encourage reading, one proprietary, six not. The proprietary: Perusall, an online platform for what might be called collective reading, allowing students to make notes and respond to other students’ notes while reading e-books and online course materials. (E-books must be ordered through Perusall.) The six non-proprietary strategies: Make reading count toward a grade by means of quizzes and journals. Don’t summarize for students. Ask students to do more than recall brute facts. Devote time to “reading” audio and visual media. Go over confusing material in class. And teach students to be better readers.

Any capable teacher of literature has likely already put into practice the last five of these six strategies. The first is probably the point of greatest resistance: everyone hates quizzes. I think I must have been way ahead of some curve, as I began giving brief quizzes at the start of class at least twenty-five years ago. Quizzes usually counted for twenty or twenty-five percent of a semester grade. And because I dropped the two or three lowest quiz grades and offered occasional extra-credit questions, a quiz average could easily rise above 100. (I think 113 was the record high.) And because a quiz average could sink well below the lowest letter grade, students who didn’t do the reading tended to drift away mid-semester. So my classes were filled with students who did the reading.

One thing about quizzes: because there are so many ways not to do the reading in a literature class, quizzes had to be Spark- and Shmoop-proof. I would come in with a handful of questions that could be answered only from having done the reading (or so I hoped). Quizzes were fast: often just one answer to get 100. Notes were permitted. Students could cover their bets too, if they wanted. And if questions didn’t click, I’d happily supply others. Was it tedious to collect all that paper? You bet. I saved further tedium by holding on to quizzes and returning them in stapled bunches.

It occurs to me only now that doing-the-reading is a matter of Rule 7:

The only rule is work. If you work, it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.

The long and short of it is that I was willing to pay my students, so to speak, to do the reading. It was in everyone’s interest to do so.