Political Science Educator: volume 28, issue 1
Reflections
By Colin M. Brown (colin.brown@northeastern.edu)
I came out of an undergraduate and graduate tradition of assigning massive reading lists on each course syllabus. While I often did not read everything assigned (sorry!), I remember spending a considerable amount of time reading outside of class. It took a long time for me to fully grasp how political science readings worked, and I spent a lot of time unlearning how to read—which I had always done by starting at the first word and consecutively reading every other word, slowly, and in order.
When it came time for me to start assigning readings, I found that students were also daunted by the long reading lists and not engaging with the works I had so carefully chosen. To encourage greater reading and to help my students learn more quickly how academic reading works, I started developing “reading groups” where students in my introductory courses would be assigned a list of readings that they had to learn collectively and teach each other, but not attempt to read everything themselves. I hoped that this would be a signal to my students, largely first-year majors or upper-level students taking an elective, that there were different and potentially better ways of reading. After several years, I have found that students really appear to value the chance to read a few things more thoroughly and take ownership on teaching some of the material to each other.
Background
There has been significant and growing concern about our students’ ability to read in the college classroom. This has been blamed on changes to K-12 reading instruction (Kotsko 2024; McMurtrie 2024), students being more and more pragmatic about their time in face of increasing demands (MacPhail 2019), or a lack of understanding about how academic texts actually work (Jamieson 2013). It may also come from a perceived mismatch in how much reading is emphasized by faculty against how much they believe it benefits their grades (Gorzycki et al 2020), or an expectation that faculty should have the teaching and/or lecture skills to convey all the information in class (Gorzycki et al 2020). The role of COVID-era adaptations and the increasing role of smartphones in reading and communication have also been blamed (McMurtrie 2024). While it is quite likely that we overestimate how much of the reading students in the past completed—and certainly not enough thought was given to the way that disability or neurodivergence may have affected student approaches to “doing the reading”—there appears to be a clear feeling among instructors that students are doing less of the reading since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as they may be complaining more about how much reading is being assigned.
Faculty may also be unwilling to teach reading strategies, as “learning how to read” feels like it should be something that students would have already learned before coming to college—and students are likely to have internalized this idea that they should already know how to read, making it more difficult for them to seek help (Smale 2020). Even if faculty value reading as a strategy, faculty are often unlikely to incorporate it explicitly into curricula in favor of course content (Desa et al 2020). And there are usually few resources devoted to teaching disciplinary faculty how to teach reading literacy.
It is unlikely that any one of us can reverse these trends in our own classroom, all by ourselves. Any attempt to use college classroom strategies to fix this will quickly run up against structural limits, particularly if there are broader changes in primary education or our broader reading culture. Nonetheless, instructors have an obligation to try solutions, and if students are reading less—and less able to read—we have to come up with ways to try and increase the amount of reading that students are exposed to, and to increase their confidence with the kinds of academic texts that our discipline produces and which they’ll want to be able to access in policy, research, or journalistic careers.
A method that I have been using in my own classes is to create “reading groups.” Sets of readings are assigned to the group rather than expected of every individual in class, and the group is accountable for collectively having done the reading and taught the main points to one another. After a few years—and keeping this going through the disruptions of COVID-19—I have found this to be at least moderately effective at providing some additional support to develop reading strategies and allowing my introductory courses (primarily comparative politics in my case) to cover more of the broad range of questions that political science deals with.
Setting up Reading Groups
As with groups in almost all my classes, I ask students to fill out a one-question survey asking if they prefer to work on projects collaboratively or to “divide and conquer,” grouping preferred working styles together but otherwise assigning them randomly. (This is a tactic for reducing intragroup conflict recommended to me by our university’s center for teaching and learning and has anecdotally worked quite well for me.) The syllabus and reading list on our class LMS clearly indicate which readings are assigned to the groups to be read in this way, and which much smaller subset of readings are expected to be read in their entirety by each student. This ends up being the majority of the assigned reading in the middle part of the class; I usually start the groups about 3 weeks into the semester and wrap them up for the last 2-3 weeks of our 14-week semesters.
I allow students to distribute the workload in the group according to preference, background knowledge, time, and working strategies, usually with each student taking about one reading per week. To build in a little bit of slack, I usually assign one fewer reading per week than the groups’ size, so that if my groups are primarily made up of five students there are about four readings per week.
This kind of assignment is particularly well-suited for empirical, qualitative and/or quantitative academic research journal articles. These already make up a large part of many syllabi especially for upper-level courses, and we seem to largely assume that over the course of an undergraduate career students will eventually figure out how to read these. But the specific kind of writing that appears in peer-reviewed outlets has particular aspects that make it: a) unintuitive for beginners, but b) amenable to explicitly teaching and demystifying. By assigning these to the groups and requiring them to teach each other, students appear to much more quickly understand that there are central arguments in these papers, and that they as non-researchers do not actually need to read, comprehend and analyze every word.
While the main point of assigning research articles in this way is to help them learn how to engage with the format, it also allows the group to more fully survey the kinds of work published in political science journals. Each student may only read a few papers in depth, but as a group they begin to get a sense of what political scientists actually do in the important and perhaps most visible part of our work that is knowledge production (that creates a body of knowledge and set of practices of systemically discovering politics).
In addition to holding students accountable for the main arguments of the assigned group readings on quizzes and the final exam, I give groups a template for a study guide that they can fill in and use to share their notes within the group. On the final exam, they are allowed to use the study guide to help them more quickly find the right texts to cite and draw on for short essays. The study guide earns them points but is not letter-graded, simply encouraging them to make sure they cover all of the readings by the time the term is over. It also scaffolds the learning by requiring pre-processing of some material before the recall required on the quizzes and final exam. As with all group projects, occasional check-ins may be needed and groups may find that some members do not fully pully their weight. Because the final assignment is letter-graded this is usually resolved within the groups—with some students occasionally free-riding—but the long-term nature of the group over the course of the semester has usually allowed enough time for the groups to resolve conflicts on their own or seek my assistance.
One disadvantage is that I am unable to assume that any particular student has done any particular reading, even though they should be (and usually are) pretty familiar with the main points. If there are readings that I want students to grapple with—that don’t have a set of straightforward points—I need to assign those separately and make it clear that they are required to read it directly. Making sure there is time in class designed to discuss these also signals the importance of each student reading them. But given the amount of group readings assigned, and the nature of an introductory course, I am much stingier with this kind of deeper text and only assign a small number of them. However, this also tends to signal the importance of this kind of reading and contrast the different reading strategies that different kinds of writing might require.
Conclusions
As mentioned above, there is only so far that our strategies can help students with reading skills, especially as few of us in political science are specifically trained in teaching literacy. Because of this, simply giving students the time and space to practice, having them help each other, and clearly signaling the importance of reading by giving it class time—and communicating that it’s a skill to develop, not a talent or something they “missed”—has allowed me to continue assigning a considerable amount of reading in introductory courses with buy-in from most of the students.
Appendix – Study Guide Template
Here is one suggestion of how to organize your study guides so that you’re focused on the things you need to know, for the quizzes/exams and as a general student of political science, without spending too long on anyone reading:
- Article Title:
- Author & Year:
- Main Point:
- Puzzle/Problem/Debate:
- Type of Data:
- Hypotheses:
- Criticisms:
- Interesting Notes:
Remember to write these in a way that your classmates can understand even if they haven’t read them. But remember also this isn’t letter graded—don’t spend too much time polishing this or making it “perfect” for the instructor to read! Feel free to change or add or subtract a category based on what works for you and your group.
Some ways to think about the above categories:
- Main Point: In 2-3 sentences, what is their main point? If we only learn/remember one thing, what should it be?
- Puzzle/Problem/Debate: In a sentence or two, What is the “puzzle” or problem they’re trying to solve, or what is the debate they are taking part in?
- Hypotheses: What were their hypotheses? Which ones held up?
- Criticisms: Critique the article. What are one or two flaws or limits to the article? Are they serious flaws, or just things that could be improved in another study? You won’t always have this, but you should try to develop the habit of it!
- Interesting Notes: A couple of interesting facts or details that helped you understand the piece or you think might be useful to know for other readings or just in general. Keep this pretty short, but use this as a hook for future learning or to remind yourself of interesting things that were useful but not the main point.
References
Desa, Geoffrey, Pamela J. Howard, Meg Gorzycki, and Diane D. Allen. 2020. “Essential but Invisible: Collegiate Academic Reading Explored from the Faculty Perspective.” College Teaching 68(3): 126-137.
Gorzycki, Meg, Geoffrey Desa, Pamela J. Howard, and Diane D. Allen. 2020. “’Reading Is Important,’ but ‘I Don’t Read’: Undergraduates’ Experiences With Academic Reading,” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 63(5): 499-508
Jamieson, Sandra. 2013. “Reading and Engaging Sources: What Students’ Use of Sources Reveals About Advanced Reading Skills.” Special issue of Across the Disciplines, Dec. 11. https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/reading/jamieson.cfm
Kotsko, Adam. 2014. “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted.” Slate, Feb. 11. https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html
MacPhail, Theresa, 2019. “Are You Assigning Too Much Reading? Or Just Too Much Boring Reading?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 27. https://www.chronicle.com/article/are-you-assigning-too-much-reading-or-just-too-much-boring-reading/
McMurtrie, Beth. 2024. “Is this the End of Reading?” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9. https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-this-the-end-of-reading
Smale, Maura A. 2020. “’It’s a lot to take in’ – Undergraduate Experiences with Assigned Reading.” Working Paper, CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1329&context=ny_pubs
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Colin M. Brown is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Political Science at Northeastern University. His research focuses are on immigrant political incorporation and participation in Europe and in the pedagogy of related skills (such as writing and empathy) in the political science classroom.
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. All issues of The Political Science Educator can be viewed here.
Editors: Colin Brown (Northeastern University), Matt Evans (Northwest Arkansas Community College)
Submissions: editor.PSE.newsletter@gmail.com
As part of APSA’s mission to support political science education across the discipline, APSA Educate has republished The Political Science Educator since 2021. Please visit APSA Educate’s Political Science Educator digital collection here.
