72 CHAPTER 3 | FRom IdEnTIFyIng ClAIms To AnAlyzIng ARgumEnTsJ
ust the other day one of my undergraduate assistants reported a
friend’s boast that he had not read anything for school since fifth
grade. A student at an excellent university, successful, “clever,” “smart,”
he can write papers, take exams, participate in class or online discus-
sions. Why would he have to read?
Students sometimes don’t buy the class books. Professors are shocked.
Several years ago a student told me that she regarded all assigned
reading as “recommended,” even if the professors labeled it “required.”
Were professors so dumb that they didn’t know that?
The idea of assigned reading, as the core activity of college students,
is old. Students don’t see it as central; faculty do.
And though I used to, and sometimes still do, spend a lot of energy
lamenting this, by taking a broader view of the nature of reading and
writing, I have come to understand it and even to some extent accept it.
Student avoidance of reading is not an entirely new problem. When
I was in graduate school, in the 1980s, one of my most indelible memo-
ries was of a new classmate, straight out of a first-rate college, com-
plaining in our anthropology theory class that we had to keep finding
out what other people thought. When was it time for us to convey our
viewpoints? Why all that reading?
Some college course evaluations ask students what percentage of the
reading they did. Some report they did as much as 90 percent. Some as
little as 25 percent.
In a systematic study of college students’ reading, Kylie Baier and
four colleagues reported that students mostly (40 percent) read for
exams. Almost 19 percent don’t read for class. In terms of time, 94 per-
cent of students spend less than two hours on any given reading for
class; 62 percent spend less than an hour. Thirty-two percent believe
they could get an A without reading; 89 percent believe they could get
at least a C.
Among many other educational crises, there is a perceived crisis
given that “students are increasingly reading less and less.”
When faculty enter new institutions, they often ask colleagues:
How much reading should I assign? Some departments offer guide-
lines about the number of pages: Assign twenty-five pages for each
meeting of first-year classes, but no more than one hundred pages a
week for any course. This has always struck me as strange, given that
a page of a novel and a page of a double-column textbook have com-
pletely different amounts of text, and take different kinds of attention
and time. In response to this faculty challenge, Steve Volk — named the
Carnegie Professor of the Year in 2011, so he knows something about
teaching — wrote on the Web site of Oberlin College’s Center for Teach-
ing Innovation and Excellence that there is no magic formula for num-
bers of pages. He suggests instead that faculty consider “What do you
want the reading to do?”1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 91003_GRE_5344_Ch3_055_079.indd 72 11/19/14 11:06 AM