I’m on the Reading Crew this year, and we’ve been discussing how to improve our students’ relationship with the written word. We have a nice cross section of departments represented, which has highlighted the diverse ways in which we interact with text.
In science, we are often asking students to read dense and/or dry non-fiction, and finding that they either flat out refuse, or read it without taking anything in. This antagonism can range from not reading instructions and shutting down out of frustration because they don’t understand the question being asked (which was explained in the preceding paragraph that they skipped), or the wailing and gnashing of teeth that ensues when I tell my AP bio students that they are responsible for information contained in their textbook.
I feel I’m a rather pragmatic person, and I pick my battles. The textbook is a hill I’m willing to die on for a few reasons.
- Reading dense text for information is difficult, but it’s a skill that can be developed. I view one of my jobs in AP Bio to be training them to do this.
- College science courses will assume students have the ability to extract information from textbooks. Not all topics have a youtube video you can watch to explain it to you. Office hours are for clarification, not wholesale reteaching of something that is assumed to have been covered.
- Being bored and powering through it is an important life skill.
We’re in Unit 3 of 8 for AP Bio, and I’ve tried 3 approaches to getting them to use the textbook.
- Unit 1: “Read chapter 2 before class on Wednesday.”
- Unit 2: “Skip to the chapter summary and read that through. If you don’t understand one of the points, then go back to that portion and read it. Read the section headings, spend time with the figures and make sure you understand them, and if you still have questions about the figures, then dig into the text. Do this ahead of class on Wednesday.”
- Unit 3: “Read the headings and spend some time with the figures. We’ll talk about the material in class on Wednesday. You’re then expected to go and read the textbook now that you have some familiarity with the topic.”
Unit four will probably be Unit 3 plus reading quizzes, because my students who read regularly are doing well, and my students who don’t are really struggling. I know it’s correlation and not necessarily causation, but I also don’t think that making them absorb some information from a book is detrimental to their education.
Our students do a fair bit of whining, so I’m not sure how much is actual despair and how much is them being cranky about being inconvenienced. Nevertheless, I continue to try to thread that needle of pushing them harder than they want to be pushed, but not losing hearts and minds, because if I do that, they’ll stop trying for me.
fascinating post. I suspect you will get the best results from method 3. Just a thought because you are dealing with dense material and a solid way to support students who struggle more is to have them come to an office hour a pre-teach a difficult concept so that when the group hears the info for the first time, they are actually hearing it for the second (hence not playing catch-up). lao a solid strategy for foreign language learning — read fairy tale everyone knows to the class in the language you want them to learn… they will have the basic thread and be able to grasp more vocabulary and flow than if you read something they could not predict
Thanks for sharing, Marissa. I've been trying a new approach to reading in AP Gov this year. Last year, I basically said, "Read this section and be prepared to be quizzed." This year, I'm doing a lot more previewing of the reading in class, telling the students what they'll be reading and giving them a broad overview. I think the results have been positive based on quiz scores, though there are a few other variables that could be skewing the data. I'll poll my students to see if they feel that previewing the reading has been helpful.
Probably, though I'm trying method 3 on by far the densest material yet (cell respiration and photosynthesis), so the signal to noise ratio will be high.
It sounds like we've arrived at similar strategies. My concern is that we're supposed to be preparing these students for the rigors of higher education, and the professors "prereading" the information for them isn't going to happen (or maybe it will; I've been out of school for a long time).
Have you noticed a pattern in the students who are able to get through the reading and those who really struggle? It doesn't seem to be the standard "covid babies" dichotomy here.
This is so great- you have given me ideas for how I might offer options in my classes, too.
I recently presented on our NWEA MAP Growth testing from the Fall of 2023. We have a definitive need to improve reading skills at Carondelet HS. Although our students are high achiever [our students are in the 75th Percentile (median)], they show low-average (45th Percentile) in growth. Taking the time to switch the paradigm from reading for knowledge to reading for meaning will give them powerful skills that will benefit them in college and beyond. Just because they can read does not mean they know how to be critical readers and thinkers. This has to be taught and developed. Taking the time to be intentional about how we launch a reading assignment and how we encourage active reading during an assignment will have the dividends we desire for them.