Many of York's instructors painstakingly assemble kits of readings for courses, striving to provide their students with diverse and challenging original sources. Yet will those students do the readings?
Remarkably little is known about how students engage with reading kits and about how instructors can select readings most effectively. While experimental psychologists can tell us the results of laboratory studies of the cognitive processes that reading involves, educational philosophers can advocate interdependent learning processes, and students can offer in–class feedback, each of these sources has its limitations. Psychological research removes students from their ordinary settings and tells us more about how students read than whether they do so; work of a more philosophical nature has tended not to provide empirical evidence; and students' impressions tend to be collected unsystematically or in conditions where confidentiality can not be ensured.
In 1998–2000, I attempted to address these issues by conducting research involving twelve courses taught by six York instructors from five disciplines, with totals of 334 students and 394 assigned readings. The students provided systematic feedback on each reading, using a questionnaire I devised. For their part, the instructors participated in qualitative interviews before and after receiving student feedback. In some cases, I was able to study a particular course for two consecutive years. The following sections highlight some of what the participating instructors and I learned about students' reading, instructors' teaching, and the practice of evaluation.
Shorter readings are better just because it is easier to stay attentive
until the end (Humanities student)
Too much material to take in all at one time sometimes (Sociology student).
In all but one of the courses I studied, numerous students requested that instructors shorten and/or reduce the number of readings. In a very rough exploration of whether this strategy would increase student reading, I examined whether students recalled a greater proportion of their readings in those courses where fewer were assigned. Regardless of whether 7 or 57 readings had been assigned, absolutely no relation between these variables was apparent.
However, it was apparent that the sheer number of readings students were able to recall rose with the number assigned. Thus, despite their frequent appeals for less to read, students appeared to respond positively to instructors' high expectations about the amount of reading required.
French Studies instructor, in 1st interview: I say to the students, you have to fly casual [with the reading by X], we know each other. Colleagues would say, the kids can't handle it. I would say, they're not kids and yes, they can – look at the course evaluations.
The same instructor, in a subsequent interview, after reading student feedback such as "X was pretty impossible to understand. I didn't get anything out of the reading.": For X, there are massive comments. I say, ok, that could make me drop it.
A concern mentioned by students of all disciplines I studied was that readings could be too difficult. In part, this occurred because the instructors in the study had a strong pedagogical commitment to exposing students to journal articles and other original sources while students were "baffled by the strangeness and complexity of primary sources and by their unfamiliarity with academic discourse." (Bean 1996)
The scenario quoted above is an extreme one. Only occasionally did instructors decide to drop a reading in response to student feedback. Another response was to recognize that to students, poor writing can magnify hugely the apparent complexity of a text. Therefore, instructors concluded, more attention should be paid to style when choosing readings. Finally, instructors thought that they should be more explicit to students about their reasons for assigning difficult readings. One instructor remarked: "they should be challenged with difficult readings but something that comes through is that, if it is difficult because they're left on their own to judge it or if it is analyzed, but insufficiently, that's bad."
[I did not expect students to rate case studies so positively] because the cases are much more demanding and there's more pressure in class to discuss them. But I give them the 12 in class and I tell them that one of them is going to be on the final, so usually they study them quite well. (Administrative Studies instructor)
I based my opinions of the readings on the assignments that were given out. I think that a lot of the readings were just other information that was not useful for assignments and exams. (Sociology student)
To the surprise of several instructors, York students judged definitively that the importance of a reading could be determined by whether it was well explicated in class periods or used in assignments or exams. While this finding seems to imply that instructors should apply a simple "use it or lose it" formula when they select readings, Bean (1996) is more cautious. He recommends making students responsible for material not covered in class in order to break "the vicious reading cycle...teachers explain readings in class because students are poor readers; students read poorly because teachers explain the readings in class."
Basically, I crossed out the material from the Bible. I understand that Christianity is the basis of Western Culture. But I don't think there should be a lot of this. (Humanities student)
Some [readings] are very outdated. It is hard to discuss in 1999 about ideas as old as 1992. (Administrative Studies student)
Any current events might be included during the time they are happening, especially if there is a relation to the History context. (History student)
In addition to preferring materials relevant to their grades, students sought out materials that were familiar, contemporary, or personally meaningful. The instructors I studied felt ambivalent about this. On the one hand, they applauded students' interest in having academic work speak to their experiences and concurred with researchers who locate students' personal experiences at the heart of learning. On the other, instructors also insisted that students develop the analytic skills to deal with both the personal and the general, the familiar and the strange. In this perspective, they agreed with those researchers who depict new college students as cognitive egocentrists.
The quote above about the relevance of the Bible is but one illustration of how students can read course materials as statements about the bodies or identities in the classroom. Remarks to the effect that a person of colour should delete material on race, or that a feminist should change her readings because "a lot of the femininity material isn't as important", and so forth, underscore the chilly climate that student evaluations can create for instructors.
An instructor perusing my longer report for its practical recommendations might find many helpful, or at least benign, pointers: discuss your reading selection with someone, enlist the help of a professional librarian, test your predictions about how the sex (and other identities) of authors are distributed, use systematic student evaluations, and so forth. However, I would place foremost the recommendation that instructors recognize how their choice of readings, and students' use of them, are imbued with the tensions of today's academy.
In my longer report, I show that these tensions are manifest in the complex and sometimes contradictory roles in which students and instructors are cast. A student may be depicted as, at once, a mercenary, an egocentrist, an overwhelmed novice, an independent source of knowledge, a member of the Dead Poets Society, and a vulnerable individual whose confidentiality must be protected. An instructor may be, at once, harried, eager to challenge, isolated by colleagues, embattled by consumerism, surprised by the difficulty of predicting students' preferences, promulgator of a chilly climate, or subjected to one. Accordingly, the student–instructor relation of learning and teaching takes many intricate forms.
This recommendation diverges from the others in a fundamental way. It directs instructors to identify collectively, rather than through individual initiative, the institutional and political factors that influence how they teach (see Child and Williams 1996, who address these issues). In part, I advocate collective action because these factors may be perceived more readily in consciousness–raising discussions, which elicit multiple perspectives and experiences, than in individual reflection. In part, it is because such factors are best addressed by collective action.
Bean, J. (1996) Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey–Bass.
Child, M. and Williams, D.D. (1996) "College learning and teaching: Struggling with/in the tensions." Studies in Higher Education 21(1):31–42.
Please contact Katherine Bischoping at kbischop@yorku.ca for a copy of the complete report with references, statistical tables, and the student feedback questionnaire. She is also available for departmental workshops.