Ecolibrium
Faculty Resource Library

Skill: Reading for College

Home » Reading for College

Students struggle with reading assignments in college classes, in particular with reading scholarly writing, reading for analysis/comprehension, and completing reading assignments on time.

As a result, students often come to class unprepared or have difficulty with projects and assignments that have significant reading expectations.

Skill Objectives:

Become comfortable with reading and interpreting different types of source material, and, in particular using different reading strategies for different kinds of sources.

Develop skills at finding main ideas and themes of sources and reading with intention to further develop an understanding of these ideas and themes.

Develop tactics and habits for pacing reading assignments and completing reading assignments on time.

Suggested Activities

Discover materials to help teach and explain this skill as well as ideas for assignments, assessments, and reflections.

In-Class Exercise

Collaborative Close Reading

As a class, read and explore a short passage from a reading relevant to the course topic.

In-Class Exercise

Reading Predictions

Short Assignment

Reading for Ideas

Assignment Inflection

Reading through Annotation

Assignment Inflection

Introduce Reading Tools & Tactics

Get Assistance

Looking for additional advice and resources for this skill? Contact the author for more help.

Faculty Supports

Get ideas about how to best reinforce this skill and integrate it into your own course design.

Focus on Incremental Progress

If students are struggling a lot with getting an entire long article, book, etc. completed, look for small victories. While ideally you want them to read and understand the entire text, focus instead on making sure each student reads/understands a section of the text during class. Build on that victory, helping students to understand that becoming a better reader can be an incremental and developmental skill.

Devote Classtime

If students are regularly struggling with getting the reading done, use class time for reading. This doesn’t have to be a silent, individual activity.
- Invite students to read in groups, if they like, perhaps taking turns reading out loud and helping each other with difficult passages.
- Assign a short section for everyone to read individually and then come back together as a class to discuss.

Prepare for the Unprepared

Try to avoid the (understandable) inclination to think that if students haven’t done the reading your plans for class will stall. Instead, think creatively about how to approach this dilemma. Avoid shaming students for not completing the reading; it is counter-productive or may miss the larger problem. You could
- use this as an opportunity to talk to students about reading and why they didn’t do it/struggled with it.
- use one of the activity suggestions for this skill as a way to explore the reading during class time.
- spend the first 15 minutes of the class with everyone silently reading until they come to something that either interests them or confuses them, then come back as a class and discuss where people stopped and why.
- choose a passage of the text that you find particularly important and read it out loud; use this to jump-start conversation about the topic, more broadly.

Be Transparent

Talk openly and honestly from the start about the challenges of college reading
- what it is like to read different kinds of texts and which ones they (and you!) struggle with
- what reading was like for them in high school and how it is the same/different from what they are encountering in college
- share reading strategies, tips, and tactics

Familiarize Yourself

Make sure you understand the differences yourself and the terminology that this module is teaching students.

Ecolibrium Faculty Resource Library