Why Don’t Students Read?

“Reading, and particularly the kinds of reading that professors often assign, is something that’s time consuming … and students are always looking for ways to speed up that time. They’re resistant to having to spend a lot of time outside of class … and if they can find ways to get around the reading and still “learn the material” … [or earn] an A in the class without having to do the reading, [they will].”

“We need to help our students understand—and we ourselves also need to understand—that the less time students spend, the less they’re going to learn.” 

“What’s often happening with deep reading of texts—because it’s slow, because it takes time—is [that] students are actually engaged in the reflective process that is necessary for learning … what you ideally want is for students to read with all of their background knowledge … [to] think about whether they agree with what’s said … [to] try to explain it back to themselves … [to] ask questions of the text … and that is only possible if they’re taking time … if they’re just reading a summary, all the insight that would come from that reflective process, they lose … And I definitely don’t think students think of reading this way, and that’s partly on us to help them understand.”

“It’s not [that] I want [students] to bang their head against a really hard text [for its own sake]. I want them to spend time thinking about their own view. I think, oftentimes, people think about reading as, “I’m learning from somebody else.” And, of course, that’s true. But it’s just as much about … reflecting on your own thoughts, or it should be.”

“[Because] taking the time is itself necessary for building the connections and having the insights … it’s actually the inefficiency of the reading that’s a good thing.”