There has been a consistent downward trend in the amount of time college students spend reading and completing assignments outside of class. In this episode, Betsy Barre joins us to discuss some strategies that might be used to increase student motivation to engage with assigned coursework.
Betsy is an Assistant Provost and the Executive Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University. In 2017 she won, with Justin Esarey, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education’s Innovation Award for their Course Workload Estimator. Among her many other roles, Betsy is also a Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions.
Show Notes
- Alonso, Johanna (2024). “How Much Do Students Really Read?” Inside Higher Ed.
- Barre, Betsy (2021). Student Workload. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 183. April 14.
- Course Workload Estimator
- Workload Estimator version 2
- American Time Use Survey
- National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)
- Malesic, John (2024). “There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore.” New York Times. October 25.
- Yeager, D. (2024). 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. Random House.
- Hypothesis
- Perusall
- Johns, A. (2023). Information, Media and Mind in Modern America: The Science of Reading. University of Chicago Press.
- Caleb McDaniel. How to Read for Your History Class.
- Wake Forest Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT)
Transcript
John: There has been a consistent downward trend in the amount of time college students spend reading and completing assignments outside of class. In this episode, we discuss some strategies that might be used to increase student motivation to engage with assigned coursework.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…
Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.
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John: Our guest today is Betsy Barre. Betsy is an Assistant Provost and the Executive Director of the Center for Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University. In 2017 she won, with Justin Esarey, the Professional and Organizational Development Network in Higher Education’s Innovation Award for their Course Workload Estimator. Among her many other roles, Betsy is also a Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions. Welcome back, Betsy.
Betsy: Thanks, it’s great to be back.
Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Betsy, are you drinking tea today?
Betsy: I am drinking tea and I’m drinking a raspberry tea.
Rebecca: Oh, that sounds nice. It sounds like it would be really refreshing for what is a very hot October day here. [LAUGHTER]
Betsy: Oh, it’s hot for you all, okay.
John: Yeah, we’re recording it at the very end of October, and it warmed up into the 70s today.
Betsy: Wow.
Rebecca: Like upper 70s, yeah.
John: It was in the 30s and 40s earlier this week. So it’s a nice change. And I am drinking a peppermint spearmint blend today
Rebecca: That sounds nice and refreshing as well.
John: It is.
Rebecca: I have a Scottish afternoon tea, but also a giant thing of water, because it is so hot. [LAUGHTER]
Betsy: Smart.
John: I should have brought a giant thing of water, because I’ve been sitting in this chair now for three hours because I had back-to-back meetings, but I had refilled the tea. [LAUGHTER] We saw an article and the September 25, 2024 issue of Inside Higher Ed, discussing how much time college students spend reading. This article provided a variety of evidence indicating that students are increasingly relying on YouTube videos and ChatGPT or other AI summaries rather than the articles that faculty assigned them to read. We saw your reaction to this article on social media, [LAUGHTER] and wanted to follow up with you on this. What do you think are the causes of this decline in reading by college students?
Betsy: Sure, and just so the listeners know, I think my reaction on social media was, “Well, this was a depressing read before bed.” So I think that was my initial reaction, and then we had some good discussions. So I think the causes are complicated. I think what struck me the most about the article that I, in full disclosure, sort of clicked on it because I was curious and have been thinking a lot about the relationship between AI and reading. And what struck me about the article was it wasn’t just AI and it was a general, sort of long standing issue of, at least from my perspective, how students think about work outside of class, and I think we’ve talked about this before in other contexts on this podcast as well. And that I think reading, and particularly the kinds of reading that professors often assign, is something that’s time consuming. So yes, writing papers is time consuming, problem sets are time consuming, reading is especially time consuming often if we’re giving them challenging things to read, 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. They often think “my time outside of class should be for studying, not necessarily doing a bunch of, quote unquote busy work.” And so if they can find ways to get around the reading and still, quote unquote, learn the material, like if I’m still getting an A in the class without having to do the reading, I think the most depressing thing about that article was that there was no student they talked to. I think it was some dramatic claim like that they didn’t find any student who did all the reading, [LAUGHTER] or something along those lines. And I’ve seen this throughout my career. I’m sure you all have as well. And even talking with students, some of my best students, my students that I advise. When I was working at Rice, I worked with students who were student advisors to younger students, and they would often, quite explicitly say: “the most important advice I can give you is you don’t have to do all the reading.” So to me, it’s like a long standing issue. There are lots of causes. I don’t think it’s just AI, but certainly AI isn’t making it easier for us.
Rebecca: What’s lost when students start relying on video or AI generated content instead of written work specifically, when we narrow in on this idea of reading?
Betsy: Yeah, I think this is a really important question. Those of us that are thinking about AI in the classroom, how it’s disrupting, if it is disrupting education, we need to be honest with ourselves as we’re thinking about our goals and whether we need to revisit our goals. And so one really radical question you could ask, and some people who are not humanists [LAUGHTER] or not even educators often will ask like, “Well, is it really that important to be reading these long texts anymore, if they can just get summaries for their job? Like, why do we need to teach these skills? Is it as important anymore?” And I’m open to that question, but I think there’s a lot that is lost, and I think there’s a lot of really recent interesting work that I’ve been reading, thinking about, about how reading functions for us. And the way I like to think about it is that, well, there’s different kinds of reading, first of all, so that’s worth saying too. So sometimes we have students read almost as a replacement for content delivery. So it’s like I would give a lecture, but I don’t have time to give a lecture, so read these notes from my lecture, or here’s a training manual, [LAUGHTER] something just that basic, like read this math book to learn how to do this problem. And then you have literature, which I think a lot of people when they’re talking about reading, they think about literature, and we could talk about that more, but I also often, as somebody who is a big fan of non-fiction, like I have a lot of books. I have a huge library, and people often assume that means I read a lot of literature, which I actually don’t read a lot of literature, not anything against it, but, I think we often forget the value of just being a reader about non-fiction as well. So there’s reading for entertainment, or not entertainment, but just like feeling putting yourself in the perspective of another, which is really important, we want to help our students engage in perspective taking. But I actually think what’s often happening with deep reading of texts, because it’s slow, because it takes time, is students are actually engaged in the reflective process that is necessary for learning; that in an ideal world, they’re not just skimming and like getting the information. Sometimes our students do read that way, like I literally am just turning the page and reading every word and say I read the text, like I did my homework. But what you ideally want is for students to read with all of their background knowledge, interacting with the text so that they make inferences. They think about whether they agree with what’s said is true. They try to explain it back to themselves. They ask questions of the text, and that is only possible if they’re taking time. If they have a summary given to them, or if they’re just reading a summary, all the insight that would come from that reflective process, they lose. And so there’s a sort of learning opportunity that is lost. And I definitely don’t think students think of reading this way, and that’s partly on us to help them understand that the function of reading is not just like dumping information in your head, that there’s more that should be going on when you’re reading.
Rebecca: Seems like that same opportunity is lost when you take the approach of I have looked at every single word on this page.
Betsy: Yeah, yeah, right. Get back to the discussion we’ve had before about my workload estimator when I was really interested in how long it takes students to read. As I sort of briefly dipped my toe in the literature on reading as a sort of biological act. And one of the things that is pretty clear in the literature is that good, strong readers will speed up and slow down at different times, and they’ll pause and they’ll circle back to different things. And oftentimes, college students, it really is this, like, steady rate, left to right, just like reading the words, and that’s decoding, like, that’s a skill, like, I’m just reading the words so that I know that word, I know that word, I know that word. But they’re not actually thinking about the meaning of the text as a whole. And so helping them understand that is important, and that that suggests you should slow down and speed up at different times and not just check something off your list.
John: And in general, students are not just cutting back time on reading. They seem to be cutting back time on pretty much all activities outside of class. The American Time Use surveys have found a pretty steady decline over the years, going way back before COVID, but it certainly was accelerated during COVID, that shows that students are spending less time doing class work outside.
Betsy: And that’s been a big concern of mine, generally. I think, honestly, the article in Inside Higher Ed was prompted by AI and concerns about reading, but then ended up [LAUGHTER] realizing they were actually discovering more interesting things about student perceptions of work, and I don’t think it’s just on them, and I’m sure I’ve shared this before in these conversations about workload, is that oftentimes we, as institutions, structure the degree making certain assumptions about how much time students will spend. We aren’t always clear about that, but we’re like, “Oh yeah, you can work a 40 hour a week job,” but we’re trying to make it flexible for students, and often what we mean by flexible is that you can do it in less time, and I don’t think we’ve often grappled enough with like that learning requires time on task, and that 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. But higher ed’s built on this model that students are going to, of their own initiative, put time into the learning outside of class, and that isn’t often happening, and I think it’s pretty consistent from the research that that’s not happening and it’s getting worse. And as much as I hate the like, “oh, in my day…”, [LAUGHTER] there is literature that shows that it is actually getting worse… how much time students are spending, and it’s not just because they’re resistant. They’re not coming in expecting to spend that time. And so that’s its own interesting like, how do we set expectations for how much time students should be spending? And individually, we can do that. But I think our institutions can do that as well. And oftentimes we’re giving them other things to do outside of the classroom with, like campus life and other activities that can also take time away. I know we’ve talked about this before, because I know Rebecca we’ve talked about in like art, like, there’s more of an expectation that you’re in the studio all the time, and that’s just kind of a norm. But that’s not true for other students who are working a lot.
Rebecca: We still have the same problem with reading.
Betsy: Yeah, actually, I’m curious. [LAUGHTER] Do you think, sorry, I’m gonna ask you questions now. Do you feel like there’s even more resistance to reading because they want to just, like, do hands on practical like, let me just do this stuff?
Rebecca: I think sometimes that they see more value in that if we’re not really explicit about what the reading or what those other kinds of activities help you gain to complement those hands-on skills, then I think that would be true, where there’s practical hands-on activities in a class. So speaking of other pressing news, the National Assessment of Educational Progress indicates that the pandemic accelerated the downward trend in the reading skills of K-12 students that began around 2012, which really is exemplifying what you were just saying, Betsy, about students not coming in with this [LAUGHTER] expectation of reading. And the proportion of 13-year old students that reported that they read for fun declined from 27% in 2012 to 14% in 2022. What strategies might we use to help encourage students to read more and to develop their reading skills? Full disclosure, I have a second grader that I’m super trying [LAUGHTER] to encourage to read for fun for some of these same reasons.
Betsy: Yeah, these questions are very, very interesting, and I’ve been reading a lot about it. Ironically, I’ve been reading a lot about reading, and I can’t remember where I was just reading the other day, but similar kinds of things, like among college students, and maybe it was in this article too. Like, if you ask them to name your favorite book, or something, the most meaningful book, and how much they struggle to come up with their favorite book. For a long time, I thought, and again, this is my bias, because I really like non-fiction, and I think non-fiction reading is really important. I remember when I was in K through 12, non-fiction was literally like, you’re reading a manual. It’s like, the most boring stuff you could ever read. [LAUGHTER] So like, either you’re doing something very exciting in fiction, or you weren’t really reading arguments, you were reading information, you weren’t actually reading arguments. And so for me, I was like, “We need to teach young people to read for argument.” This is really important, and to learn how to think about ideas. And so I do think that some of that has come into K through 12 over the past 10 – 12, years. But I think also that’s meant that there’s been more pressure with testing, etc., to do that kind of reading for argument and reasoning, which is a good thing. I’m glad that that’s happening, but that probably means there’s less room for the fun stuff that the students get to read. And I also think there’s something about, and maybe this is me being a nerdy idealist too, but, like, it’s not just fiction that it can be fun. You can also have fun reading for argument. If students are passionate about a topic, they’re passionate about sustainability, they’re passionate about art, getting them to read some exciting things about that could be valuable too. And honestly, I think we’re reading a lot, but we’re reading in different ways online, and so that’s an also fascinating question of how that’s changing the way that people read, and then for our young people, I think we’re still figuring this out, but to the extent to which video is replacing reading, and how that is changing their abilities and their habits, and it’s like a muscle. I think there’s been a lot of people have written about reading that it’s not something that’s natural to us. The language is natural to us. But reading is something we invented. It’s like a technology we invented. So you actually have to, like, get them to practice it, get all of us to practice it. If we’re not using it a lot, it becomes harder and harder for us to engage that skill. And it’s a lot of different things. So I don’t have major advice about how to get your kids to be excited, other than giving them fun things that they choose to read. The standard things of teaching, giving people choice, letting them see the value of it in some ways. I mean, that’s important too, because if they feel like they’re just doing it to check a box, like this was a lot of time I could have been spending doing something else. What’s the value of this? I think that’s where summaries and videos are really interesting, because students may be able to get a summary or watch a video of it really quickly, and do fine on our assessments, and then if we’re upset, like you didn’t do the thing I really wanted, the burden is on us to make the case for why that additional step was important, if they did just as well on our assessments. And I think we got to figure that out, and maybe we find out that it’s not as important to do the reading, but I have a hunch that the reading is important, and we just need to figure out how to better assess and explain to students why that’s important.
John: And with the switch to AI summaries and the switch to videos for summaries of material, there’s a lot of nuance that’s likely to be lost, that is captured in the written word. And along with that slower cognitive processing, I think students are getting a much more superficial understanding of many of the concepts we want them to learn about. And I think we may also see that a little bit in social media, much of the divisive social media, would not have the same effect if people had done a little bit more reading [LAUGHTER], or were not just tuned into their particular local networks and they had a broader understanding of what is reality [LAUGHTER] and what is not.
Betsy: Yeah, there’s some interesting questions about how information and argument… there’s the question of the medium, of how it’s spread, and fascinating questions on that front, too. Yeah, I was talking to a friend about this after we were having that discussion on social media the other day… the Inside Higher Ed article… and in philosophy, and not just philosophy, but in allied humanistic fields, there’s historically, even before AI or thinking about summaries, there have been a lot of debate about the value of assigning primary sources to students. So do I need to have them read Kant? Granted, it would be in translation, but do I need to have them read John Stuart Mill? Or can I have them read a secondary summary of those sources, whether it’s a textbook or a secondary sort of argument that sort of gives you an overview of the various moral theories. And I’ve always been a very strong advocate that, in certain classes, secondary sources are more important than the primary… in certain classes. So in some classes, the primary sources are important, but in other classes, the secondary sources are fine depending on what your goals are. So if your goal is for them to take the moral theory and then apply it, then in some ways, what’s more important is that they get quickly to the application. If your goal is to deeply understand Kant, of course, you got to read the primary source, like it’s not even a question. And so what’s interesting is I was talking to my friend about this, is that I was thinking, in some ways, AI summaries may raise similar kinds of questions. Well, first of all, you have the issue of it could just be wrong. So, let’s be clear about that, where it’s not good enough yet. So I’m imagining a world in which it’s perfect. It would be my summary, [LAUGHTER] not mine, but like anybody, it’s not that I’m perfect, but like, there would be a good summary that we’d be happy and proud to put in front of our students, and it’s not there yet. So I want to be mindful of that. So first of all, there’s the problem of it not being fully accurate and missing things, but if it is a good summary, then I think one question could be asked is “Well, is it like a secondary source that they can quickly get the material and then do something else with it?” And maybe in some classes, that’s valuable, that I want them to then integrate it with other things, or I want them to do something else. And so that’s where sort I’m of landing was on that. That’s kind of interesting, but I’m coming around to this idea of, as you helpfully reminded the listeners, is this idea that taking the time is itself necessary for building the connections and having the insights, that it’s actually the inefficiency of the reading that’s a good thing, that it takes a lot of time like, and so a lot of people like, “Uh, you know, this thing could have been an article.” There’s this book that could have been an article, and oftentimes they are right about that, because it repeats itself, like oftentimes books will repeat themselves. They’ll go on like weird sort of tangents. But sometimes, as a reader, you think of a different insight the second time you read the thing, and that there is something about that inefficiency of the medium that allows us to do the sort of reflection and inference and have insights that we wouldn’t have had if we got the quick summary. So I know that seems a little strange, but I’m starting to think this more. So it’s not like I want to give them difficult things that are intentionally difficult, but I want them to just spend time on it, that’s the big thing. It’s not I want them to bang their head against a really hard text. 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 you reflecting on your own thoughts, or it should be you reflecting on your own thoughts and connecting prior knowledge with new things you’re picking up. And this is why annotation is so important in my classes, I try to really emphasize annotation as an important skill, but you wouldn’t have to do that to have that moment. But yes, as you can tell, I swing back and forth on what I think about how bad it is. Is it good? Is it disaster if they’re using summaries? Sometimes, I think it might be okay, but as long as they’re spending time. I guess that’s my point. If you got a summary, and you spent a ton of time with that summary, and we’re thinking about it with respect to other things, and you may be building similar connections, assuming it’s accurate, and you’re applying it in ways that are kind of interesting, than you would reading the primary source. But again, it just depends on the goal for your course.
Rebecca: I think you’ve underscored this idea that it depends on context, and there’s times when a video or a summary could help someone spark interest or find out whether or not this is the source or the article that’s worth reading.
Betsy: Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
Rebecca: …or digging into so there’s certainly value in having those tools available to us as instructors, but we have to really think intentionally about when to employ them and when not to make substitutions, when the slow read is the thing that maybe we’re looking for, but also help students understand why we’re making those choices. And it always comes down to being really explicit about why we’re doing things.
Betsy: Yeah, part of my interest in reading is also, if I’m being honest, it’s also tied to my sort of interest in the liberal arts, more generally, and interdisciplinarity, and just the sort of value I’ve seen in my own life, but that I see in others who I deeply admire, who have really broad knowledge of a lot of different things. These are the well read people that you encounter, and they just know a bunch of stuff, [LAUGHTER] and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I read this thing over here the other day, or I read this, and I’m pulling from that literature.” And there’s something for me personally, that’s really attractive about that. And so I often think about, how do I model that for students? How do I help them see that as attractive, and to see that it’s not just something you’re born with, that this is something that through a sort of disciplined skill and practice of making time in your day for reading or for learning, and it’s really for learning, but reading is the way in which most of us do that, can have major benefits for your life as a person, to help you understand the world, help you understand yourself as you move forward in the world. And so I often think about, how do I help them see that really well read people, really smart people, quote, unquote, are not just naturally smart, but they’re often just really well read, and they’ve taken the time to read, to make it attractive to them, because motivation is ultimately, at the end of the day, what we need to be thinking about here is, how do we motivate students to do this? And I think a lot of us think back to, “Well, what motivated me” like, “Why was I interested in reading?” Not the perfect answer, because students aren’t all us, but at least, it can help us start thinking of some ideas that might be useful for some of our students.
John: One of the things I see when I teach labor economics, and sometimes in introductory economics, is we talk about the economics of education, and one of the things we look at is what the value of an education is to individuals. And two of the models we talk about are the human capital model, where there’s skill development and people end up being more productive because they’ve acquired skills, but there’s also the signaling model, where basically it’s the credential or the degree that has value. And I’ve seen a shift over the last decade or so in students’ perceptions of this, where they seem to be thinking of education more as this credential they get rather than just that they’re acquiring some skills that may be useful in their future life, in terms of being able to do a variety of things. And it’s hard to break that.[LAUGHTER]
Betsy: It is.
John: What can we do to help students see that they really are developing skills through reading and through engaging with their coursework in ways that are a little less superficial?
Betsy: Yeah, it’s a tough one. There’s no easy answer here. When I teach, I get to teach what I want to teach, which is nice, being a Director of a Teaching Center, and I usually try to teach things that I think will attract students’ intrinsic interest. So as I shared before the podcast, I often teach a class on sex and relationships and ethics. So I get them to read about ethics, because they’re interested in their relationships. But what I try to do, again so it’s not just like, hey, I’m going to sneak it in and then you’re not going to realize it. Yes, they’re reading hard stuff, but to try to get them to reflect in a meta way about this is valuable in other areas of your life too. It’s not just here that a question comes up in life. I don’t have kids, but I have friends that have kids, a question for their kids, or some medical issue comes up, and academics usually approach this very differently. [LAUGHTER] They’re like, I’m gonna go read things. I’m gonna go read things to figure this out. I guess googling counts as a kind of reading, but academics are doing something different than somebody who’s not an academic might do, and to help them see that, that skill of being able to quickly figure out where you can go to get not just want the canonical view, but to get conflicting views. Like, I know how to find second opinions about this issue that I’m curious about. And here’s a debate in the literature about and often this is why, probably doctors find us super annoying, is that we come in with, like, multiple research articles, [LAUGHTER] with different views on something. That’s probably not attractive to some of our students, but helping them see that it’s relevant to all areas of their life, and not just getting a grade for school. I think the more we can tie our courses to things that they will be doing later in life, I think it will at least help, but even just getting them to have conversations. I’m glad you’re talking about this in your labor class. Like, what is college for? And they may be right in some ways, that it is this signaling mechanism, but then to empower them to say, like, was that how you want it to be? Would you want something better? And like, what would it look like if you had something better? And how can we help together to make this environment one where you can do something more than just collecting a degree to signal that you are now ready for a job. But I don’t have any clear solutions. I’m glad you’re talking about it, though. I think that’s the first step, is getting them to reflect on their own reasons for being in school for sure.
Rebecca: So new faculty, it’s often something that we talk about on the podcast… and I know that we’ve talked a bit about it before too, Betsy… start their teaching careers with certain sets of expectations. One might be that their students would complete their readings outside of class, and then maybe they quickly realize that their students don’t do that, and then you’re trying to negotiate what to do. And perhaps the response is that they use in-class instruction time to make up for it, and then students realize, “Oh, I don’t have to do the reading.” And then downward spiral from there. What strategies can we use as instructors, or can we encourage instructors to use to motivate students to complete assignments outside of the classroom. And this goes beyond just readings, but when we started this conversation a little bit, but I think it’s also ways to help our instructors feel prepared for the classroom and for this idea that, like, oh, students are going to do stuff outside of class, but only if we kind of set up the parameters, maybe in the right way.
Betsy: So it’s interesting. There have been a number of pieces about student reading that have come out since the Inside Higher Ed piece. So there’s my friend Jon Malesic, writes for The New York Times a piece. I don’t if you saw that New York Times piece about “There’s a Very Good Reason Why Students Aren’t Reading,” and it’s related. Actually, the argument is similar to the one that John just… it’s about preparing for jobs. And maybe that’s not important, but there have been a couple other ones, and I’m always fascinated by reading the comment section, which I should never do, [LAUGHTER] but I do read the comment section. And the number of people who are just like, mad at faculty, and they’re like, just make it hard, like, hold them to high standards, and they’ll do it. Like, if they’re not doing the reading, it’s because you’re not making it hard enough. I mean, there’s some truth to that, but it’s also the case that, well, first of all, some schools, you can’t just fail all your students. [LAUGHTER] They’re not going to let you do that, but it’s also really a challenge to figure out how, especially now with AI, to assess them in a way that is well designed enough that you’re not punishing the students who did do the work outside of class, but that you are somehow capturing those who didn’t do it, like unless we’re going to actually follow our students around and watch what they’re doing and check off boxes and sort of model like that. It’s going to be tough for us to design it like an exam that perfectly distinguishes between those who didn’t do it and those who did do it. Now, of course, it can distinguish between knowledge, but that’s a different story. So I guess that’s a long way of saying, I don’t think that the sort of, let’s just create a bunch of hard quizzes is the solution. I do think that if we just read it to them when they come to class, I think, Rebecca, you’re 100% right. Like they’re gonna figure out very quickly I don’t need to do that. And in fact, that’s why they tell other students that you don’t need to do the readings. They’re not stupid. And one strong recommendation, I just started reading this book called 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. It came out in, I think, the end of August or September by David Yeager, and he’s a developmental psychologist who also taught high school. And again, I’m only on chapter three. What I appreciate about it is the way he talks about motivation is that we often talk about young people as if, like they’re neurobiologically incompetent, like they don’t have fully develop prefrontal cortexes, so they’re just idiots, and we gotta just tell them what to do, because they can’t be trusted. And he sort of debunks that and says, actually, neuroscience suggests that there was a good reason for us to promote that for the sake of, like, the death penalty. We didn’t want to, like, have the death penalty on young people, so we really pushed that undeveloped prefrontal cortex for a while. But in fact, our students are quite strategic and thoughtful, but they just have different goals than us. [LAUGHTER] What they’re very interested in is social status and respect. So this is really interesting, but so far, he isn’t saying anything that’s like radical to anyone who’s been a teacher, but it’s nice to put it all together and to think about, how can we use the things they care about to motivate them: social status and respect? And so one thing, it’s not perfect, instead of just trying to, like, negatively incentivize them with a low grade and that sort of thing, and one thing that I think has been somewhat useful for me is getting them to work together outside of class. I know that’s easier said than done at an institution. I’m at an institution where my students aren’t working 40 hours a week, it’s hard to get them organized outside of class at other places. I want to fully acknowledge that. But the more there’s sort of a social cost and also a social benefit to the work that they’re doing, the more they’re going to care about it. Now that’s not exactly reading [LAUGHTER] together, but it’s at least discussing the reading, and then maybe they can model for each other: here’s the things you can do outside of class, or in class. So even just something like when you come into class, the first thing we’re going to do is, I’m going to put you into pairs, and you’re going to come to class with three questions about the reading. A lot of people do like come with three questions about the reading, but the element that I like about what I’ve done sometimes is that I have them ask those three questions to the other student, and the other student has to answer them. And so if this becomes like a regular habit practice, first 5,10 minutes of class, you know you’re going to get paired up and have to answer one of your fellow students’ questions. Now some may have no shame at all and be like whatever. I didn’t do the reading, but the hope is that that sort of social pressure of I might have to be able to answer my friend’s questions about the reading might motivate them to do some reading too. I do really love like Hypothesis and Perusall, the kind of social reading annotation tool not going to solve all these problems, but leaning into the social aspects of the classroom, I think can be really powerful, and then also just not underestimating our power, if they respect us as instructors, to encourage them and to thank them for the work they’re doing. So when they’re doing the hard work of reading, I think sometimes we focus on the negative. We’re so annoyed when they’re not reading, and then we shame them and we’re pissed, myself included, I get really mad, but when they do do the reading, and they show up and they’ve got really insightful questions, honoring that, showing them that respect and saying like this is really great, that was really close reading. With your friends around watching let me say that this student has read really closely, and that’s a kind of motivating thing for them too. It’s like, I want to make my professor proud, and I want the other students to see that I’m doing too now, different contexts matter. Maybe you’re on a campus where that’s too nerdy, it’s not going to happen, but I’ve seen it happen. I definitely have seen that happen, and at least as a nudge in that direction.
John: And so if we wanna get students to have more practice in reading, Hypothesis or Perusall is one strategy. But for many Gen Ed courses, there are also adaptive learning, or personalized learning systems, where students read a little bit, but then they’re asked questions, where they have to make connections to the material that become a small part of their grade. So it does add just a little bit of incentive to do that, where it’s actually often easier just to work through it that way than to rely only on a summary. But you can also provide videos, where if you created the videos, or if you use a tool that takes existing videos and embed questions in them. It’s having them look at it, perhaps a little bit more deeply, and doing a bit more cognitive processing while they’re watching the video to try to make those connections. And we do know that multimodal learning is beneficial, so seeing it from multiple perspectives is good, as long as they’re not relying only on shortcuts, and so I think some of those tools, in some cases where that’s available, that could help as well.
Betsy: Yeah, these are all good. I’m actually realizing I didn’t fully answer the question about new faculty too, because there’s a number of things that I think it’s useful that new faculty be thinking about. Like, I had a new faculty member that came to me at one point and said, like, “Am I like, totally radical to think that maybe I should have a whole class where I assign no reading?” Like, it’s kind of radical question, you know, they’re scared because there are cultural norms associated with that. And so I actually want to just say, in response to John too, that the multimodal stuff is important. Like, I’m not someone who is, like, never any video. Sometimes there are places and context and purposes for that. And I do think there’s some interesting benefits to digital reading that, like, if you’re reading on a screen, there’s some downsides that are really interesting to talk about too. But because I think it doesn’t have to be a downside, but just the habit of how we’ve traditionally built our habits of reading on screens is to read at the surface level, and so we tend to just go faster. But if you build in these, like the quiz questions in the video, where you build in spots to pause and reflect and ask questions. And I’ve kind of done that before with Hypothesis, or even before Hypothesis existed, you could sort of annotate a PDF and you just seed it with questions or summaries and have the students engage, or at least slow down, like slow down here, and think about this. I want you to think about this question. I think that’s great. Like, I love that idea. I think the more we have some strategies that people have used that seem to have worked, that we can share with our new faculty. Because I think the temptation with new faculty is often like, I’m just going to do a quiz, or just to assume they’re going to read it no matter what which they often won’t, or to assign too much. So that’s also part of it too, like being really intentional about how much you assign, and then to make sure that you’re rewarding them for that careful reading is important. The last time I taught, I was teaching a first-year seminar where their reading was an outcome. So something like, it’s a university-wide set of outcomes. So I didn’t get to choose these outcomes. But one of them was, like, critical reading, and it was post AI, so it was recently, and I thought, “Hmm, how am I going to assess?” because normally you would assess reading by giving a paper, and if you can’t write this paper, you probably didn’t read it very closely. And now that’s not always so clear, that connection is not always so clear. So I decided to do some in-class reading annotation where they hadn’t seen the reading before. They had homework where they had to annotate their readings, but they could do that on their own, like I wasn’t really policing that. But the incentive for them doing that was I would give them feedback, because they would have, on the midterm, and in the final I would be giving them a new section of text that they hadn’t read before. That was philosophy about sex, like so, about sexual ethics, and then they would have to annotate that. And what really struck me, and I talked to my students about it again, we got very meta about it, was they were quite good at this, quite good at it, which was shocking, because, and I guess it depends on where you are. I want to be mindful of that. But I would say that what was noticeable to me was that when I didn’t give them the time and the incentive to read closely and read well, they wouldn’t do that, and then they’d come to class and they wouldn’t know what was going on. And it’s just as easy for a faculty member, and this is important for new faculty to hear too, is to assume, “Oh, our students don’t really know how to read, or they’re really struggling,” when it may just be they don’t put the time into it. It may just be they’re not putting time into it. But when I gave them time in class to read a passage really closely, to ask questions, to draw inferences, to do all the things that we want them to do, they were very much able to do that, in the varying levels, but many of them did quite a good job. And so I asked them, I was like, “This is amazing.” And they’re like, Oh my God. They’re like, we would never read like this. It would take so much time. And they weren’t saying it to be rude to me, but they were like, how would you ever read this closely? And it goes back to this issue of how much time are they expecting to set aside time for class. And even if they do set aside time, the idea of sitting for an hour with a text is just very foreign to them. And so having those conversations with our students, I think, is where we just gotta begin and explain why we think it’s useful, and also share our own struggles. Like I actually think it’s really just as useful for me to share sometimes that, in my life, podcasts and videos and all these other things that I’m so busy and I’m reading quickly, that my stamina for sitting with a textbook, not a textbook, but a book that’s actually like a print book. I’ll give another recommendation too. Adrian Johns has a history book. So he’s a historian at the University of Chicago, and I picked this up a couple weeks ago. It’s a history of the science of reading. So it’s called Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America: The Science of Reading. And it’s a real history. So it’s, like, very dense, and I’m loving it, but I’m like, “Whoa. It’s been a while since I’ve read a very long and dense history.” So letting students know this is a muscle that you have to practice to build that stamina. And unfortunately, and I think that’s what I appreciate about some of the other articles that have been floating around about reading, is that when we give them shorter passages, it’s great they can learn how to read for argument, but they may not be getting the stamina or practicing having the stamina to sit for periods in time and read. And the biggest question I have left open to me is, why is that important? Because I think somebody could ask me, like, why is that important? Isn’t that just a technology we don’t need anymore? And so I think the burden is on those of us that want to defend that practice. So saying, here’s the extra stuff it gives you, beyond just watching a video or even listening to an audiobook, right? The audiobook… I listen to tons of audiobooks, but what’s missing when you’re listening to an audiobook versus reading a text and figuring that out, I think, is a really important question for educators, particularly humanists, as we move forward.
Rebecca: One of the things that you just underscored when you were describing what you do in your class, Betsy, is it sounds like you’re teaching students how to annotate a text, rather than assuming that students know how to annotate a text or how to read closely. And that seems like if that’s an expectation that instructor has, that that’s something that we would actually need to include maybe some instruction around, if that’s something that we want students to be doing.
Betsy: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. Thanks for drawing attention to that. And I actually think that we all have different purposes. And I think just like with writing, we often just assume students know how to write in our discipline, and then they go from English to history to econ, and we all have radically different expectations for what good writing is. And the same thing is true with reading, actually. We all read differently. We all expect students to be asking different questions of texts when they’re reading. And so, while I do give them guidance, I often say, when you’re reading for philosophy, here’s some questions you should be asking, or here’s some things I want you to be reflecting on. And so I do have a little guide of the kinds of annotations, like “note when it reminds you of something else you’ve learned in class.” So this is again, trying to connect it to their prior knowledge or something else you know in your life. If you disagree with something that is said, circle that and explain why. If you are confused, ask a question, and it’s the kind of basic stuff of processing information when you’re learning. But I want to nudge them in that direction. But of course, they’ve also learned to annotate texts. A lot of them, when you ask them about annotation, a lot of my first-year students, at least, they remember it from literature class where they were doing something very different when they were annotating the text, which is fine, but just different. So I think we do if we want students to annotate or to learn how to read, we have to talk to them about different kinds of reading. And so I actually also sometimes will assign some short readings about reading [LAUGHTER] in the first week. So my former colleague at Rice, who’s a historian, Caleb McDaniel, has a blog post called “How to read for history.” And even though I don’t teach history, it’s pretty good, at least allied enough that it works pretty well. And then there’s a couple pieces about reading philosophy that I really appreciate. It’s basically like you’re struggling with the author over your mind, of like, whether you’re going to agree or not, and sort of thinking of reading that way, that you’re like, in this battle with the author, which students do not think of, right? They’re like, I’m just reading it because my professor says it’s true and I’m just going to it’s true, and I’m just going to try to process the information for the exam. And so assigning those short pieces on reading and then having a conversation about reading can be really fun, but at the end of the day, we’re still going to run up against, even if I convince them that there’s a value to reading, how much time they have. And they have many motivations, many concerns, many things that are of interest to them as they should, and how do we get the thing we want them to do to be top priority? And I think that’s just always a challenge for teaching, particularly for college instructors, and that’s where I think that book on motivation is at least helping me try to think creatively about some things that I might do socially, to nudge them a little bit towards reading a little bit more carefully. Also, I want to do an experiment with them, like, I haven’t done this yet, but people have done these with AI experiments where you would have, like, half the class read it closely, and half the class read just the summary, and then have a discussion, and then have a meta discussion about how that went. The students who read it all closely, and they might actually do the reading that time, because they’re participating in an experiment. And the more you can get them to discover the thing we want them to believe, I think that might have some of a role, but I think the overall summary of a lot of what I’ve been saying today is that I think if we haven’t done this already, it’s time that we actually have explicit conversations with students, that we actually engage them in conversations about this, instead of just trying to pull on the edges with like little strategy changes. If we expect them to read, maybe we don’t, but if we expect them to read, we’re going to have to talk to them about it and get their thoughts and have some discussion about it.
John: One of the things you suggested earlier is the value of being well read in general. I’m wondering if we could use AI a bit to help motivate students, because it’s going to lead to some pretty dramatic transformations in job markets. Many of the job categories that are most popular today didn’t exist 30 or 40 years ago, and many of the things they may be doing in the future could be very different than what they think they’re doing when they’re motivated towards this one particular career and just reminding them that the world is changing quite a bit, and they may need to be prepared to go in different directions than they initially expect in response to those changing roles or the changing job market conditions.
Betsy: Yeah, 100% I also think… our teaching center is in a library, like many teaching centers, and I’m very happy about that, because I really love libraries, and I’ve often talked that sometimes like I really got to get the students on board with this, but about the symbolic power of libraries. And one of the things that I think is really interesting in the AI age is helping students think about the library. You walk out, you look at the stacks, and it’s just like a whole bunch of information. Oh, isn’t that amazing? But you can also think of it as like human knowledge, the collection of human knowledge throughout centuries. It’s all here. And so some of our students may not be there yet, but some of our students, I think, are anxious about competing with AI, like, I still want to show that there’s some value to the human and to say, like, this is the collective knowledge of humanity, right? Reading. And what’s ironic about it, of course, is that the reason AI is as good as it is is because it is actually drawing on that collective knowledge of humanity, and it’s really a mirror of us more than it is us. But that’s another reason to motivate them is to say, like the reason it’s capable of doing what it’s doing is because it is essentially kind of well read. And so for you to be aware of all of these fields, all of these questions that you might ask of the AI, you’re going to be better able to ask questions of the AI, you’re going to be able to perform, hopefully, better than the AI. So yeah, the more we can help them see the value of this, beyond just narrow training, I think is a good thing, and I do believe that we can make a case for liberal arts in the age of AI, because there’s so many questions it raises that narrow training is not going to prepare us to answer. But I do love the idea of thinking about like libraries, and there’s something beautiful about a library, I don’t know. I almost feel like I should teach a class on the book or something, or about reading, because there’s more to it. It’s in our pop culture too. It’s not just a bunch of nerds who are sitting off in an ivory tower. There’s a lot of interesting stuff. You think about Game of Thrones, like there was that big library in Game of Thrones, which I loved. But I think it’d be interesting to get students to reflect on what is going on when we use a library, what’s the library trying to symbolize here, and what happens if we don’t read? I mean, I’d be curious to know what students would think. I haven’t really asked them that, like what if we stopped reading all together, will we be okay? [LAUGHTER] And they might say, “I don’t know, as long as we have videos, like we’re good,” but it’s worth engaging them in this conversation, because I don’t think we have a clear answer yet, and whenever that’s the case, getting students as conversation partners is just as important as figuring out how to nudge them in particular directions.
Rebecca: I think sometimes the benefit of the AI conversation is reminding them that they need to gain expertise, just as you were kind of indicating Betsy in kind of the area that you want to use AI in, and the surrounding areas, that if you gain expertise, then you can use the tool better and more efficiently, because you could write better prompts, etc, and get the tool to do what you want it to do. But if you’re writing as a novice in a discipline, then it kind of spits out novice-like answers. [LAUGHTER]
Betsy: Yeah. And actually, one of the things I love about being a teaching center director, I’ve always loved interdisciplinary work. It’s part of why I did religious studies instead of philosophy for my PhD. So I did philosophy in undergrad, and then I wanted to do comparative ethics. I did that in a religion department because it was area studies, so I could do a little history, a little anthropology, a little philosophy, is that I have always loved interdisciplinary work, and I like being a teaching center because now I get to expand it even broader, like I can go talk to physicists, I can go talk to dancers, you know, much broader [LAUGHTER] than even my own narrow area. And I do sometimes think that my prompting is because I have that wide sort of swath. And I can say, well, let me actually pull these two weird things together that no one would think to pull together, and then its answers are amazing because it actually has that wide swath of knowledge, but you have to know how to prompt it to do that. Also, the more you know about the interconnectedness of knowledge, the better able you’ll be to engage with AI as well. So, yeah, really fascinating thought there, for sure, and trying to encourage them on that front.
Rebecca: Gotta use every tool in the toolbox.
Betsy: Yeah, that’s right, [LAUGHTER] including sometimes external reinforcement. Sometimes we need to nudge them with a little bit of motivation that way. But, they do read some things, but it’s interesting what they read, and why are they reading it, and how can we leverage those things that they do read? And I guess I just am feeling this is often the case, you want them to have at least one powerful experience reading. You want them to see firsthand what the benefit is. You still will have an uphill battle after that, because they have lots of other prior interests, but sometimes they come in and they just don’t even see the value at all. Of like, “I’ve never had a reading experience where I had an aha moment.” I bet you there’s some students that that’s the case, and so giving them a powerful reading experience, and maybe that means there is some in-class reading that happens not because I don’t trust you, but because I just want to have this moment where I’m going to walk you through this. I meant to say this before John and I forgot to mention this, because you were mentioning doing the reading and then inserting the questions in the reading and sort of walking them through a video. There’s real power for instructors to help students see how you read a text. So even if it’s not a common practice, like doing one read aloud, where you like… think aloud is often that’s used in the literature… where you will read a text and pause, and at every part that you would normally pause and say, like, “Oh, now I would normally ask this question of the text,” or “now I’m thinking of this, and now I’m reflecting on that.” And that can be really powerful for students, because that is not how they’re reading. To help them model what you want them to do, but also to help them see, oh, I can see why yeah, you’re gonna get a lot more out of that experience if you’re doing that than if you were just reading and decoding the words, which is often what they do. And I hope that listeners, if you have solutions for this challenge, will write in or call in and maybe on the next episode, because it’s really tricky. And I often said that I actually think AI is more of a threat for reading than it is for writing, because I think students don’t like to spend a lot of time outside of class, and they haven’t been convinced of the value of reading yet. And AI is pretty good at reading, not amazing, but pretty good if you give it the full text. And so yes, something we’re all going to have to face and figure out. And so I hope that we’ll think about it collectively, learn from each other.
Rebecca: So we always wrap up, as you know, by asking, what’s next? [LAUGHTER]
Betsy: Yeah, so I’m reading these books, one on motivation and one on the science of reading, and I think we’ll probably do that motivation book as a reading group, on CAT, next semester. We’re also having Jim Lang come to campus in the spring, and so I’m also interested in how this intersects with attention as well, motivation and attention and reading and all these things that he’s interested in all sort of mixed up together. And so I hope that next semester, this will be something of a theme. I know I have some faculty who are really interested in thinking about reading and the future of reading, and it’s a core learning outcome of our Gen Ed. And so we’ve also been thinking about doing some programming around the faculty who are teaching. Courses where they’re supposed to be teaching critical reading to rethink, what does this mean in this age, and how do we motivate students to do this? How do we assess it? So hopefully, maybe I’ll have more insight in a year as we talk about it at Wake Forest. But that’s where we’re going next.
John: Well, thank you. It’s always great having these conversations with you, and we’re looking forward to that next one
Betsy: That’s the same. Thanks so much.
Rebecca: Yeah, thanks so much.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.
Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.
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