Promoting College Reading Completion and Comprehension with Reading Guides: Lessons Learned Regarding the Role of Form, Function, and Frequency
By Karin L. Becker, United States Airforce Academy, Danielle Gilbert, Dartmouth College, and Paul Bezerra, United States Airforce Academy
Encouraging college students to read is a perennial problem. Lack of reading engagement creates knowledge gaps, lowers academic performance, and can cause shallow discussions. To address this problem, we designed reading guides for an upper-division International Security Studies course. Our experiences with reading guides highlight the importance of designing and incentivizing reading guides. By paying attention to the guides’ form, function, and frequency, faculty may benefit from more engaged instruction and robust class discussion. With the benefit of our hindsight, we hope that other political science instructors can design reading guides to help their students read completely, effectively, and critically.
The Journal of Political Science Education is an intellectually rigorous, path-breaking, agenda-setting journal that publishes the highest quality scholarship on teaching and pedagogical issues in political science. The journal aims to represent the full range of questions, issues and approaches regarding political science education, including teaching-related issues, methods and techniques, learning/teaching activities and devices, educational assessment in political science, graduate education, and curriculum development.