McClain's College Reading Blog

My seven-year-old daughter is having a blast reading this summer.  She's newly literate and devouring series books (The Pet Fairies, Puppy Place, Katie Kazoo) with a passion.  Between library fines and Barnes and Noble expeditions, I'm going broke!  But, of course, I love it.  And I'm not the only one supporting her habit; the library has a reading program for kids in the community, Barnes and Noble is offering a free book to anyone who reads eight books, and her school is awarding "special prizes" to kids who complete a certain number of books. 

So here's the question:  what are college students reading this summer?  I asked my magazine-writing students this question on the last day of class.  Some are reading teen novels, like Stephanie Meyer's  TWILIGHT series.  Some are reading A. J. Jacobs' The Year of Living Biblically.  But some of them--English majors!--admitted that they didn't have much time to read in the summer.

And given that these students are among the most literary on campus, I wonder what students at the lower end of the reading spectrum are reading, and how we could encourage them to do more of it. 

I wish Barnes and Noble would give college students a free book for completing eight novels over the summer.  I wonder if my university would spring for some tacky prizes for those who complete a certain number of books.  Or how about a weekly book club, the college-aged equivalent to the library programs my daughter attends every week? 

Seton Hill does have a summer reading program, in which all freshmen are given a book we then discuss en masse and in small groups.  Many other schools do the same.  Is there more we could be doing, though, to promote reading among upperclassmen and all students? 

Tom Mortenson, a higher ed policy analyst, offers these sobering statistics on his Postsecondary Education Opportunity blog:

By any conceivable measure students from families with incomes of more than $100,000 are doing extraordinarily well in the education pipeline. They have the highest high school graduation rates (92.5%), college continuation rates for those that graduate from high school (87.0%), and bachelor's degree completion rate by age 24 for those who start college (90.1%). As a result they earn bachelor's degrees by age 24 at far higher rates (72.6%) than do students born into lower income families (27.9% in the third quartile, 16.6% in the second quartile, 12.3% in the bottom quartile).

The common statistic that 50% of those who enter college don't graduate is misleading.  Actually, 90% of wealthy kids who enter college graduate.  Meanwhile, only 12% of the poorest kids earn bachelor's degrees.  That means--yep--the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, given what we know about how a college education improves one's chances of earning a high income over a lifetime. 

A key reason poorer kids don't graduate from college--indeed, a reason some don't enter college--is that they're weak readers.  Through no fault of their own, most heard a smaller spoken vocabulary as preschoolers, had fewer books in their homes, and attended weaker public schools.  When they arrive at college, they're overwhelmed by the requirements of background knowledge, comprehension of difficult texts, and the sheer volume of reading required.  It's been said that 80% of college learning comes through reading.  If you're a weak reader, you're not passing the tests, earning the degree, nor achieving the professional and income advantages of your wealthier peers.

Lots of work is being done on this situation at the Pre-K - 12 levels, but that doesn't help our current students who are dropping out of college at alarming rates.  Can we make up for reading weakesses in college reading classes or through some other type of intervention?  What do you think?   

Today I read an article in the November 2003 Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy by Dr. Cynthia Fischer about reading comprehension strategies, and although her examples were taken from a secondary school class, they struck a chord for me.  Student Tammy, reading a set of instructions aloud, says:  "Sit at your disk with feet firmly on the floor."  She doesn't notice that she's misread "desk" as "disk" because she didn't expect the text to make sense.  She reads on, reciting most words correctly but not paying attention to their meaning.

I suspect that a number of my college students read difficult texts this same way.  When I assign Plutarch's "Consolation to His Wife," students encounter this sentence:  "Peculiar poignancy attaches to tenderness for children when their presence is altogether welcome and completely untainted by ill will and reproach."  As an instructor and experienced reader, I'm plunging ahead: asking students to discuss the oddly detached tone with which Plutarch writes to his wife about the death of their beloved daughter, eager to move into a discussion of stoicism.  But some of my students (judging from their low quiz grades) have pronounced each word in their heads without doing the things skilled readers do naturally:

• noticing that "peculiar" in this context doesn't mean "strange," but rather the older meaning of "especially intense";
• defining the word "poignancy," a word more often seen in print than occuring in speech or popular culture;
• realizing that Plutarch has switched from the particular (his own dead child) to the general (children who are wanted);
• thinking about the issue of wanted vs. unwanted children, how children are not always a Hallmark-card blessing to a family, something they may have experienced in their own lives or communities.

The question is, how do we teach students to read carefully enough to pick up on the nuances, define the terms, and ask the questions . . . without making reading into a joyless trudge through texts?   Fischer teaches her secondary students sentence by sentence, first modelling how to ask questions like those above, then transferring question-asking responsibility to the students.  Would that work with postsecondary students, or would they resent the slow pace?  And if you're tackling a few sentences per session, what's a college freshman to do about the sixty pages of a psych text to be read by tomorrow morning? 

The other issue Fischer raises, which strikes me as relevant to college students, is that they don't always know they don't know.  "But I read the essay," moans Student A, frowning at the "F" on her reading quiz.  In fact, what she may have done is to sit in front of the book, running her eyes along lines of text, but not taking them inside.  Maybe she didn't expect them to make much sense.  That's certainly how I read a detailed article about, say, lacrosse.  I don't know much about it, and I don't want to know much about it.  If pressed to read it, I'll run my eyes over the words . . . but the connection with my brain isn't made. 

I do notice that certain essays provoke student interest, and are thus better understood.  So maybe I need to (a) assign essays more immediately relevant to students; or (b) do enough pre-reading during the class beforehand so that students can connect the essay to their own interests and lives.  Even stoical old Plutarch.   

An essay in June's Atlantic Monthly, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," bemoans the difficulties of teaching developmental students. 

"Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes," writes the anonymous Professor X. "Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence."

And this, according to Professor X, points to a larger failure in our society:

"No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty."

The Atlantic essay is beautifully written and much of it rings true.  I've certainly participated in my share of grouchy end-of-term rants about impossible students.  But I think we're charged to avoid that absolute thinking about students who "will never pass," "can never write a coherent sentence," enrolled in classes "they cannot possibly pass."  If you think that way as a teacher, you're doomed.  We have to add the word "yet" to all of those clauses:  "cannot write a coherent sentence . . . YET."  "Cannot possibly pass . . . YET."  After all, where's the challenge in teaching students who could just as well learn on their own?  Why revel in the successes of students who have had spectacular home advantages before arriving in our classes and who go forth to connections, cushions, and opportunities far beyond the norm?  The truth is, we have little to do with those folks' life outcomes, even if the emotions of graduation day make them hug and thank us for teaching them the finer points of Hamlet. 

I'm with Holly, who writes on Community College English:  But what of the glorious optimism of the community college mission? (Pardon the violins...)  In the face of too many underprepared students and, probably, too many students whose ceiling-level abilities do not stretch to college-level, what do we say to that one individual student who wants to try?  

Not only that, but many have thought about the larger implications of admitting underprepared students to univerisity life.  We've been doing it in the USA since the first Harvard students in 1636 "had to be tutored because they did not know Greek and Latin well enough to study classical works written in those languages," according to Hunter Boylan's introduction to "Teaching Developmental Reading."  The 1960s and 1970s were all about reopening the universities to older students, to the poor, and to minority students. 

Boylan also points out that, given the declining size of this country's workforce and the increasing demands on it, "we can no longer afford to deny educational opportunity to those who might not yet be fully prepared to take advantage of it."  We need workers who can read, write, and think critically.  

We in academia are supposed to be the smart ones, the super-educated ones, the ones who can theorize about anything.  It's our job to figure out how to get all those underprepared students from incoherent sentences and certain failure to a decent level of success.  That might even be more important than the another metafictional analysis of Chaucer's Parliament of Fowles.   (And before my fellow medievalists jump down my throat, that's my master's thesis I'm dissing.)

While I was out on a glorious springtime run today, I had a revelation.  I've been scanning articles on developmental education, and have gathered information and ideas from our composition director, writing lab director, and academic counselor.  It's all felt like a lot of blundering--after all, I'm a medievalist by training and a creative writer by background, so what do I know about developmental education? 

Yet for better or worse, that's where my curiosity is leading me.  Today, amongst the wildflowers, birdsong, and rusted-out factory remains, it all clicked into place.  I came up with a master plan for helping developmental students at my university. 

We need to set up a learning community involving basic composition, an expanded "reading and study skills" course, and the required core course called "Faith, Religion, and Society" that most first-year students take in the fall term.  The theology course would provide content for the reading and writing courses.  Since we no longer are able to have an extended summer success program, we could incorporate a summer reading program we do with all of our students, offering our developmental students an audiobook option and email or chat-type electronic encouragement to get the summer reading done thoughtfully.

For the second term, we do a slightly-less intense learning community of, say, Seminar in Thinking and Writing (our college-level writing course) and Basic Math or Spanish I . . . still providing extra support.  Do something online over the summer (a book discussion group!  popular novels! available on MP3 players for reluctant readers!) and then try to keep the learning community together for one sophomore course, like Western Cultural Traditions.

The challenges:  scheduling, obviously; getting a theology prof to sign on; keeping the class size small enough to give lots of individual attention but big enough for a realistic amount of attrition (and of course, financing that smaller class size).  Plus, if we're going to teach reading, then both our academic skills counselor and I need to study reading . . . but no problem there, we're both interested in doing that.  This plan takes account of two strategies that, according to a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed article,  University of Alabama has used in bolstering minority and first-generation graduation rates:  learning communities and ongoing attention to at-risk students.  Ideally, we'd also use a third strategy cited in the same article:  track students in the pilot learning community to see if their graduation rate is better than that of students outside the community. 

So that's the "how."   The "why" I'll have to get to next time.    

Over on Community College English, Holly posted this after seeing a film and hearing a presentation about learning disabilities:

My reaction after seeing the film was to wonder how many of my students who seem to have difficulty reading might have some of these processing/perceptual problems and, more importantly, what I could do as a writing teacher to help them, to bring them towards competency in their reading, which is obviously what we want, I asserted confidently. No, said the ODS specialist firmly, not necessarily.

She talked about the technological possibilities now: student textbooks can be scanned in and converted from print-to-speech, web pages can be read aloud, and students can compose by talking into a microphone (a comprehensive, at least to my eyes, list of such technologies is given here). Within five years, she said, textbooks will be available as old-fashioned bound books, CD-ROMs, or downloadable mp3 files, format to be chosen by student.

So will my reluctant readers and writers now be eager listeners and talkers?

I share Holly's assumption that getting reluctant readers to become more competent at it is the goal.  But maybe reading-print-on-the-page is not the only way to go.  I'm excited about the notion that textbooks could be readily available in multiple formats.

But, wow, listening to audiobooks takes a lot longer than reading them.  I'm guessing that, for taking in extensive chunks of text (i.e. Moby Dick), reading on the page is still the best way to go.  Or am I wrong about that?

I've been reading rave reviews of learning communities in Honored but Invisible:  An Inside Look at Teaching in Community Colleges by W. Norton Grubb and associates.  Not online learning communities, but academic set-ups where the same group of students take two or three classes together, and the instructors work together to create assignments and activities relevant to all subjects involved.  Typically, learning communities include a "content" course like introductory biology, plus a math or reading course, often at the developmental level. 

Students in learning communities have higher grades and retention rates.  Learning communities can help to close the gap in graduation rates between black and white students, according to an article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education.   People are really interested in online learning and online communities these days, but the warmth and connection of in-person learning communities seem to make a difference with students who need extra support.  I'm wondering if a learning community might be a way to support struggling students at Seton Hill.  Or is everyone, students and faculty alike, too time-pressed to participate in such a venture? 

"Ignorence in the United States is not just bliss, it's widespread."  So says Bob Herbert in a New York Times editorial this week.  While his story focuses mostly on the problems of secondary schools, I'm convinced that those problems become higher ed's problems as well.  If 1/3 of high school students graduate unprepared for postsecondary work (another 1/3 don't graduate high school at all, and another lucky 1/3 graduate prepared) .. .  let's see, that means half of high school graduates are unprepared for college.  Yet according to the Education Trust, 70% of high school graduates do attend college within 2 years of graduating high school. 

Many of these folks struggle with the reading requirements of college; 1/4 of first-year students at 4-year colleges don't stay for their second year.  As Dr. Michael Kirst puts it, "College enrollment [is] soaring but completion is not." 

While we're waiting for the K-12 system to heal itself, what can we in higher ed do to help those struggling students improve their skills and reach for the better life promised by high literacy levels and a college degree?

College faculty tend to complain that this generation of students is less prepared for college than students used to be.  It's the old "kids these days" argument.  However, complaints about underprepared students date back to the 1700s and 1800s.  Schools like Harvard, Cornell, and Yale struggled to balance high academic standards with a need for students, and several formed "preparatory" departments to bring underprepared students up to college level.  Pressure for increased access to higher education continued throughout the 19th and 20th century, and universities continued to struggle with high standards versus open access. 

And we always think that our own preparation was the proper type, and that later generations' preparation is lacking.  Hmmm . . . I'm detecting more nostalgia than logic.  At the same time, there IS a study by the National Endowment of the Arts suggesting that reading comprehension and general literacy are in a state of decline.  Not sure what I think at this point . . .

I intend for this blog to be about the topic of reading--primarily developmental reading at the postsecondary level.  In it, I hope to review scholarship on the topic, scan community college blogs and journals, and record classroom experiments.  But what's a cool title for a reading blog?  My esteemed colleagues have already taken some of the great names: Dr. Michael Arnzen created Pedablogue, and Dr. Dennis Jerz has Jerz's literacy weblog.  Is it better to do something cute, like Reading is FUNdamental (which is also taken) or just go with simple and descriptive, like "Developmental Reading" or "Postsecondary Reading"? 

I'd like to check out other developmental reading blogs to get ideas, but I can't find any . . . shocking in light of the fact that approximately 87,000 new web pages have been created while I've been composing this entry (see Reeves library's cool video on information literacy for more information on this topic).