Promoting College Reading Completion and Comprehension with Reading Guides: Lessons Learned Regarding the Role of Form, Function, and Frequency

Abstract

College faculty often struggle with getting their students to read assigned materials. Even if students do read, they may not read closely or critically. Not only does the lack of effective reading undermine understanding, but it also hampers class discussions and engagement. To promote close and critical reading in a required, upper-division International Security Studies course, we offered optional reading guide worksheets as tools to increase students’ reading comprehension and completion. While our reading guides helped students focus on key terms and lesson objectives, flaws in our implementation produced a lack of perceptual value and extrinsic motivation in using the reading guides. In this article, we offer our lessons learned from the use of reading guides, focusing on their form, function, and frequency. These findings equip faculty with useful guidance in how to design and implement effective reading guides across the disciplines.

Keywords:

• Critical reading
• higher education
• academic literacy
• motivation
• reading guides
• self-regulated learning

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force Academy, the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. PA#: USAFA-DF-2023-173.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge Elizabeth Acorn, Lauren Scharff, and Rachel Whitlark for feedback on prior versions of this manuscript. They would also like to thank the students of the United States Air Force Academy’s Spring 2021 Social Sciences 311, “International Security Studies,” for their participation in this study.

Notes

1 United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) IRB # FAC20210110E Amendment 1, survey conducted on December 8–9, 2022 with current students of International Security Studies 311. The optional survey received 192 responses out of 352 students enrolled in the same course we taught, but with a different set of instructors. None of the students surveyed participated in our study, and therefore none received reading guides to help them with course readings.

2 There is an important and likely tradeoff between reading efficiency and thoroughness that should have an effect on comprehension. We hoped that our reading guides would help students comprehend as much as possible in a limited time, but we recognize the challenge in maximizing comprehension and efficiency simultaneously. Future work should continue to explore the relationship between the two.

3 The only students exempt from Social Sciences 311 are Political Science majors and Foreign Area Studies majors, who instead take a majors’-only course on similar topics. Our classes therefore represented the broadest possible swath of students at our institution who were specifically not studying international relations.

4 The students who completed the December 2022 survey took Social Sciences 311 with a different set of instructors and did not have our reading guides.

5 There are two exceptions to this “as-if random” assignment. First, Political Science and Foreign Area Studies majors do not take the class, as they instead take a majors-only course with broader topical focus. Second, at our institution, no intercollegiate athletes take classes in the last two periods of the day (at 1345 and 1445), as their teams practice every afternoon.

6 We created a survey for 33 of 40 lessons. During the other seven lessons, we had in-class assessments or activities without assigned reading.

7 We did not systematically measure the effects on class discussion, but instead present our impressions here. Future research could further test the effects of reading guides on class dialogue.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karin L. Becker

Karin L. Becker is the Director of the Communication Strategies Center at the U.S. Air Force Academy where she develops resources, curriculum, and trainings to equip cadets and faculty to read and think critically and communicate effectively. She applies her experience in technical communication and systems improvements to inform her research interests of patient-provider communication, community health promotion, and generational workforce performance.

Danielle Gilbert

Danielle Gilbert is the David and Cindy Edelson Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy and International Security at the John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. She previously served as an Assistant Professor of Military & Strategic Studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Her research interests include political violence, international security, negotiations, nationalism, and pedagogy.

Paul Bezerra

Paul Bezerra is an Assistant Professor of Military & Strategic Studies at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Dr. Bezerra is a co-principal investigator on the Correlates of War’s Militarized Interstate Dispute project and was an inaugural member of the Aspen Strategy Group’s Rising Leaders program. His research focuses on the relationship between economic assistance, political resistance, and foreign policy cooperation. Before joining the U.S. Air Force Academy, Dr. Bezerra was the National Security Affairs Postdoctoral Fellow at the U.S. Naval War College (2018) and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona (2017).