Magna 20 Minute Mentor | How Do I Get Students to Read Their Assignments Before Class?

In this Magna video, Dr. Maryellen Weimer addresses an unfortunately very common challenge for instructors, which is students attending class without having completed the assigned readings. Of course, this interferes with having meaningful participation and sharing perspectives in classroom discussions. This also hampers successful progress in hybrid courses where students are expected to take on more responsibility for learning certain portions of the course content.

Dr. Weimer presents a few strategies to help students recognize the importance of completing the reading assignments and being prepared to engage in the classroom conversations. She discusses that there can be many reasons for students being unprepared such as work, family responsibilities and lack of motivation. However, she suggests that a primary reason that the learners do not complete the assigned readings is that often there are no consequences. One of the ways to make the students more accountable is to ask specific questions about the text and require that the learners provide references from those readings. If there are no relevant responses it is important that the instructor does not provide the answers. Instead inform the students that the next class session will repeat the same inquiries and you expect some informed comments.

Another strategy is to use the assigned text in class and make specific references. The instructor can require that the students bring the reading materials along with them to class, and then ask them to review a certain section and discuss what they find is significant. The third strategy that Dr. Weimer proposes is to make students responsible for understanding about reading materials that you will not be able to cover in class. To help students identify some of the important reading topics, she places them in study groups and assigns them to review a certain section of the text and prepare a study guide to share with the rest of the class.

View this video to learn more about Dr. Weimer’s strategies and to access her supplementary materials, which includes three example assignments to engage students with the readings. This video addresses the LCCC Faculty Competency domain for Competency-Based Design and can be accessed by completing this one-time registration to view all the videos in the Magna 20 Minute Mentor series.