Though reading skills and notetaking strategies continue to evolve throughout a student’s academic career, concrete reading strategies are rarely talked about or explicitly taught at the college level. Instructors can scaffold and frame assigned readings to have significant impact on students’ reading effectiveness. When you teach reading strategies, students will be more likely to learn more and produce quality work.
Encourage Skimming
- Indicate more important sections of a text so students know where to read closely and where to skim.
- Look at the table of contents or headings with your students so they know what to expect, and they can then manage their reading time accordingly.
- Model and discuss your reading habits for determining where it is appropriate to do a close-reading versus a skim.
Contextualize the Reading
- Tell your students why you are assigning the texts you are asking them to read.
- Provide students with contextual information about the reading which will help them situate it within the larger body of work.
- Bridge what students are currently reading with prior knowledge or experience.
Promote Responding
- Provide questions for students to consider so they may address them and know what textual support to look for as they annotate.
- Encourage students to see themselves in conversation with the author/text rather than just reading to regurgitate facts.
Leverage Accessible Technology
- Assign texts that may be adapted to multiple formats (digital PDF, printable hard copy, video with captions, etc.) so students may access the material in the modality that works best for them.
- Direct students toward assistive reading technology available to them like Read & Write Gold (new tab) so they may use annotation, translation, or read-aloud functions for digital reading.
More Reading Resources for Students
Bibliography
- Bean, John C. Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001. Ch 8.
- Causes of reading difficulties, suggested strategies for students to become better readers, and methods for developing assignments that require students to interact with texts.
- Bharuthram, Sharita. “Making a Case for the Teaching of Reading across the Curriculum in Higher Education.” South African Journal of Education 32, no. 2 (May 3, 2012): 205–14.
- Blau, Sheridan. “Literary Competence and the Experience of Literature.” Style 48, no. 1 (2014): 42–47.
- Dives heavily into the role conversation and strategically timed workshops play in enhancing a student’s literacy. Discusses ways that reading can be experiential and practical through social interactions with a text as a mediating factor.
- Blau, Sheridan. “Performative Literacy: The Habits of Mind of Highly Literate Readers.” Accessed November 3, 2021. .
- Literacy has evolved over time to what is now known as “critical literacy” or the ability to make individual meaning from a text. This article outlines the differences between textual literacy, intertextual literacy, and performative literacy – in other words, moving from the text itself, to the text with other texts, to the text with entirely new knowledge – and lists the traits of performative literacy and strategies for fostering performative literacy.
- Brookfield, Stephen. Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions. First edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2012. 138-141.
- Questions for critical appraisal and analysis of texts.
- Bulger, Monica E., Richard E. Mayer, Kevin C. Almeroth, and Sheridan D. Blau. “Measuring Learner Engagement in Computer-Equipped College Classrooms.” Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 17, no. 2 (2008): 129–43.
- Cohn, Jenae. Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2021. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/83327.
- Compiles strategies for teaching reading effectively across digital and print modalities. The main approaches are classified under curation, connection, creativity, contextualization, and contemplation. Each section also includes specific digital tools that may be useful in teaching.
- Kane, Sandy, Miriam Lear, and Cecilia Maxine Dube. “Reflections on the Role of Metacognition in Student Reading and Learning at Higher Education Level.” Africa Education Review 11, no. 4 (2014): 512–25.
- Literature review and interpretation pertaining to the role that metacognition is seen to play in student performance. Recommends ways to teach strategies for metacognition.
- Köse, Neslihan, and Firdevs Günes. “Undergraduate Students’ Use of Metacognitive Strategies While Reading and the Relationship between Strategy Use and Reading Comprehension Skills.” Journal of Education and Learning 10, no. 2 (2021): 99–108.
- What is the overall level of metacognitive awareness of reading strategy use among undergraduate students? What factors influence metacognitive awareness? Suggests that students be provided with reading strategies training that considers the gender differences in the use of metacognitive strategies in reading.
- Lynn, Ethan M. "Unassisted Repeated Reading: Exploring the Effects of Intensity, Treatment Duration, Background Knowledge, Individual Variation, and Text Variation on Reading Rate." Reading in a Foreign Language 33, no. 1 (04, 2021): 30-54.
- Study of reading rate in ESL students. The results indicated that background knowledge of a subject had an impact on reading rate.
- Van Camp, Debbie, and Wesley Van Camp. “Using Content Reading Assignments in a Psychology Course to Teach Critical Reading Skills.” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 13, no. 1 (February 2013): 86–99.