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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Teaching Tips from Your TCC


Once you have convinced them to buy the book….

how can you convince them to do the required reading?  Here’s some information, liberally borrowed from an article mentioned below,  that you may find useful: 

1.      When choosing readings, consider that the average student’s reading ability is not the same as yours, and the student may not share either a love of reading or a passion for the sophisticated fiction or nonfiction that you think opens every door. Prior knowledge, ability, and motivation all affect how well (and if) students read their assignments.  Not that you shouldn’t assign complicated, life-changing prose and poetry. You should. Please do. Keep in mind that your students may need support to profit from their assigned reading.

Consider the readability of an assignment.  Readability has to do with reading ease; this is influenced by many factors, but those that are generally measured include sentence length and syllable count.
Simple Measure of Gobbledygook (SMOG) is a readability formula that estimates the years of education needed to completely understand a piece of writing. I discovered this via a link in “Getting Students to Do the Readings” in the  December 2007 issue of the Advocate, a publication of NEA Higher Education (vol. 25, No. 2).

If you’re uncertain about what the readability of your text is, you can enter some of the it and get a quick analysis at
https://wordscount.info/index.html. If you’d rather not type in text, you can apply the SMOG formula yourself. Directions are at https://www.hunter.cuny.edu/irb/smog_readability_formula.htm. You can test the readability of a web page at https://www.read-able.com/.

SMOG is only one of many readability formulas, and all formulas have some limitations. I shared this one with you because it’s new to me, and I like the WordsCount website.

2.       Teach students how an expert in your area reads. It may not be from the first word to the last without some strategy work beforehand. Expert readers consider the content of the text by applying a prereading strategy that includes reading the conclusion. Once an expert reader knows his/her destination, reading the text is more efficient. Expert readers don’t read the conclusion instead of the whole text, but they read it before reading the rest. Expert readers also read with a purpose. They know what they want before they begin and work to get it. Many students don’t do that, but they could, and it may be that you have to make the purpose clear for them.

3.      Make the reading matter in terms of your grading. How you make it matter can vary, but if you don’t make the reading significant in terms of a grade, the students are less likely to think that the reading matters at all. We know that all reading matters in both personal and global ways, but the students may not share that point of view.

Unfortunately, I can’t promise that any of these considerations will get your students to a)buy the book or b) read the book. But I’m not ready to wave the white flag. I hope that you’re not, either.

Julie Damerell
Transitional Studies
06/17/2010