The Status of Reading on Campus Now

For at least three reasons, postsecondary education is not addressing this goal effectively. First, much coursework in critical literacy or college reading as a discipline has essentially disappeared from the curriculum as a result of the developmental education reform and the associated “acceleration” movement, the goal of which is to move students into credit-bearing courses either directly or with co-requisite support courses (Park-Gaghan et al., 2021). Developmental, stand-alone reading course sequences and study strategy courses have been eliminated from university campuses and most community colleges. While some of these changes have come about through legislation or political decisions, the results are the same, as reflected in developments in various locations such as California, Texas, and Tennessee (Daugherty et al., 2018; Hern et al., 2022; Ran & Lin, 2022). Disciplinary literacy curricula (reading courses paired with different disciplines), the way we have known and taught such courses since the early 1990s, are essentially extinct (Adams, 2020c; Del Principe & Ihara, 2016). Recent research, moreover, confirms that much remedial work does not actually help students succeed in later courses or in degree completion, especially in community colleges, according to Maggie Fay, a researcher at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University (Fay, 2023). In response to state-level and institutional policy shifts, reading and learning strategy faculty have lost their jobs, had to recredential, or been shifted to other positions on campus, so their expertise is either no longer available or difficult to utilize. Only those who have been reassigned to teach college-level writing courses (or other courses within English departments) can still apply their reading and learning strategy expertise in their pedagogy if they choose to do so.

Second, the commonly acknowledged fact is that the students have not changed, and the need for reading and learning strategy instruction has not diminished. As Horning states, “The reading problem has been with us a long time and is not resolving by itself or going away” (2019b, p. 146). Recently, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (2021) has issued a position statement on the importance of reading in college writing classrooms. The statement contains evidence-based observations about the state of students’ reading and offers an array of helpful strategies for addressing students’ needs. The statement might be useful to faculty teaching co-requisite writing courses, retention specialists, peer educators, and tutors, who are all being pushed by policymakers and state mandates to make pedagogical and curricular changes to accommodate a wider range of students, whose reading placement test scores might have placed them in remedial reading classes in the past (Siegal & Gilliland, 2021). Without college reading expertise, educators these days often seem to re-invent the wheel, offering study skill workshops from the 1990s as they continue working with students who need help with reading. They often ask each other for “reading comprehension” materials as if the whole field of college reading and learning, with its extensive research and practice, has not existed for the past three decades (e.g., see Flippo & Bean, 2018).

Rapid changes in present-day technologies have visibly altered literacy practices in higher education, such as the switch to reading digital texts in both face-to-face and online learning. These changes produce a third reason that college-level classes are not addressing students’ critical literacy needs. The recently increased focus on online education, a trend only vastly accelerated in the pandemic, has led to many changes: typical assignments include more independent work on the learner’s part, more reading overall, but less discussion of it, more self-discipline, and more innovative instructional technology. Today’s college students, despite their attachment to technology, have not necessarily developed adequate strategies for critical literacy from screens (Baron, 2021; Larkin, 2021), so for all these reasons, students do not have the skills they need.

Problematic Assumptions About Reading

The truth is that not only the students are resistant to sustained, meaningful reading routines, but the instructors teaching general education courses or courses in professional programs are also resistant to the idea that reading can or should be taught as part of their classroom activity. Their reluctance to address students’ reading issues in their pedagogy can be explained by four incorrect assumptions about this issue. First, faculty think students should know how to read when they come to college. However, various studies have shown that many students lack the relevant skills (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2019) and that reading develops in important ways through the course of college and across the lifespan (Alexander, 2014; Appatova & Hiebert, 2013). A second assumption is that only students whose test scores suggest a need for developmental work require reading instruction, but Horning quotes recent quantitative and qualitative studies (e.g., ACT, 2017, 2021; Jamieson & Howard, 2016; National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2019; OECD, 2015; Stanford History Education Group, 2016) that demonstrate that “half or more of current college students lack the skills to analyze, synthesize, evaluate and use material they have read for their own purposes, in school and beyond” (Horning, 2019b, p. 137). The idea that reading only serves as a stepping stone to writing is a third incorrect assumption. A more accurate view is that reading leads to writing that in turn leads to more reading, such that completed writing should trigger new exploration through readings. This cyclical process can be represented as R⇔W to capture learning any discipline, which can guide pedagogical choices of the content area instructors.

Finally, there is the widely held view that reading “belongs” to the English department. University of Connecticut Writing Studies and reading scholar Ellen Carillo (2015), however, found that more than a half of writing faculty did not feel secure in their knowledge of reading theory and practice or their ability to teach students to read more effectively, leading Horning (2019b) to advocate for both increased attention to reading by all faculty and better preparation of writing faculty on reading. Viewed more broadly, neither content area faculty nor English faculty (Armstrong & Stahl, 2017; Gregory & Bean, 2021) have sufficient expertise in reading across the curriculum (RAC). The RAC concept has only gotten limited attention in the writing/composition field to mirror the writing across the curriculum (WAC) notion. Horning (2007) establishes an explicit parallel between WAC and RAC and calls for a special attention to developing the RAC pedagogy in the composition field:

Hand-in-hand with the current renewed emphasis on student success and a resurgence of Writing Across the Curriculum, instructors in all disciplines need to refocus [emphasis added] on Reading Across the Curriculum to address students’ needs, to achieve instructional goals, and to prepare citizens for full participation in our democracy.

(p. 1)

All Student Populations Need Critical Literacy Instruction

A number of recent reports demonstrate that all students can and should be more critical readers and writers than they currently are (ACT, 2017; Head et al., 2018; Wineburg et al., 2020). These reports need careful evaluation since their varied approaches can be biased, resulting in an incomplete picture of student skills. Three such measures discussed below, from different perspectives, provide consistent data demonstrating that students need help to become more effective critical thinkers and readers. Approaches that integrate reading instruction with writing appear to be a reasonable way to address the needs of students. And while students have legitimate concerns about the time demands they face with school, work, family responsibilities, and so forth, it is essential to point out that the relevant skills are needed not only for more advanced college coursework but also in many kinds of professional work.

Given the amount of time everyone is spending online these days, it is more important than ever to look at online skills. In contrast to prior claims about “digital natives,” most people who have internet access have become much more tech savvy as a by-product of time and need for online interaction during the pandemic. National studies done just prior to the pandemic provide a reasonable snapshot of students’ abilities with regard to evaluating materials online (Stanford History Education Group, 2016). Several studies have been done by researchers at Stanford in History Education, drawing on nationally representative samples of high school and college students. Among these, the most useful one for this discussion appeared in 2019 and required the following kinds of activities on the part of the students in an untimed test, requiring students to evaluate claims and evidence from sources such as online videos, websites, and social media sources (Stanford History Education Group and Gibson Consulting, 2019, p. 10). More than 3,000 students did these kinds of tasks in an untimed, open internet environment in the 2018–2019 school year (pp. 3–8). It is important to note that the study was done before the presidential election in November 2020 and before the pandemic, both of which may well have impacted students’ attitudes and/or abilities. The results show that almost 60% of the students could not do these tasks at all, and only 13 students (.038%) attained a perfect score (p. 23). The findings make clear the status of students’ skills with regard to online reading and the evaluation of texts. A subsequent study by the same group of researchers in 2020 found similar results (Wineburg et al., 2020). These national studies of high school students show that critical literacy skills, particularly the online ones, are in short supply.

When students come to college, they continue to struggle with the need for critical literacy skills. Additional evidence comes from both librarians, who witness students’ research efforts in the library (in person or virtually), and writing faculty, who see the outcome of the research in students’ papers. The ACRL has been sufficiently concerned about critical literacy that in 2016 it issued a second iteration of a set of guidelines and principles of information literacy specifically for higher education (ACRL, 2016). A research group that has explored students’ actual behavior when working on assigned projects across the disciplines is Project Information Literacy led by Alison Head (2021), currently at Harvard. The self-reported data from this study suggest that students are frequently overwhelmed by information available online and do not know how to find or evaluate factual and reliable information. While this data is based on self-report, it is drawn from a very large number of participants, increasing its reliability.

A third set of studies makes clear the difficulties students have with reading; evaluating and using material, whether it is found through library databases or open web searching; or using materials suggested by an instructor. The carefully done work of the Citation Project, led by Sandra Jamieson at Drew University and Rebecca Moore Howard at Syracuse, draws on a national sample of student writing that produced a database of almost 2,000 citations to published material (Jamieson & Howard, 2016). The researchers then found the original sources and analyzed what students did with them:

Citation Project researchers studied researched papers written by 174 first-year students at 16 US colleges and universities and collected in the Citation Project Source-Based Writing Corpus (CPSW). Intertextual analysis of these students’ work produced a data-based portrait of student reading and source-use practices, presenting an image of students moving into their sophomore year of college while only sometimes demonstrating expert reading, summary, and citation practices… . . Analysis of the 174 researched papers found the students working from one or two sentences in 94% of their citations; citing the first or second page of their sources in 70% of their citations; and citing only 24% of their sources more than twice.

(http://www.citationproject.net)

While the Citation Project looked at different sources in student writing, the impact of students’ troubles with reading both traditional and online materials is clear from other research, such as that on critical literacy when using the wide array of media available online. Writing about the current status of media literacy for the population in general and for students in particular, Columbia Journalism School fellow and Brazilian journalist Ricardo Gandour (2016) pointed to the challenges of developing critical literacy in the current environment. He conducted several surveys of the population at large and of teachers in particular, showing that a majority of those polled thought media literacy was more important but less taught and less understood than it was previously, due to the increasing fragmentation and polarization in online news reporting (Gandour, 2016, pp. 8–18). There is good reason to think that the situation now, after the COVID-19 pandemic and among other global crises, requires even more effort.

Media literacy includes a number of factors, beginning with the approach, advocated by Howard Schneider, director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University. A few relatively straightforward steps can help people sort good information from fake news. Students and other readers should ask some basic questions before even looking at materials they find:

They have to learn to scout the terrain first, by running some checks. First of all, you have to look for signs of fact-checking. Has the information been verified? Second, is there independence from political parties, companies or ideologies? Third, can you identify the credentials and qualifications of the publisher—the source of that information? If these three factors check out, then you’re in the news neighborhood.

(Schneider, qtd. in Gandour, 2016, p. 19)

Not only do these assorted findings from different kinds of studies show that students need help with critical literacy, but they also come from carefully constructed nationally representative samples of students, so the need is not confined to underprepared students or any other specific group. It is all students who need to be more critically literate. There is clear evidence for approaches that do work across levels and across disciplines for all students. Evidence for two specific approaches warrant discussion here because the research supporting them has been carefully done over an extended time. First, Arizona State University education professor Steve Graham and his team have done two meta-analyses of large numbers of studies of integrated reading and writing in K–12 classes (Graham, Liu, Aitken, et al. 2018; Graham, Liu, Bartlett, et al. 2018), all of which show that teaching reading and writing together helps students develop key skills. In reviewing his findings in the top journal in reading studies, Graham argues strongly for this integrated view. He writes:

As the theory and supporting evidence reviewed demonstrated, reading and writing are connected and mutually supportive. Engagement and instruction in one results in improvement in the other. As a result, advancements in the study of reading and writing cannot be maximized if the sciences of reading and writing continue to operate in largely separate fashions.

(Graham, 2020)

Adams is now a national consultant for the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), which he created for the students served by his institution. He has also written a textbook (2020b) for use in ALP classes. The ALP approach calls for students to read and write in ways that draw directly and specifically on an integrated and, it is important to note, an accelerated approach. The accelerated approach makes a difference because it means students move to credit-bearing courses immediately or more quickly, saving them both time and money. This research shows that students are more likely to succeed in an ALP program than in the traditional sequence of remedial classes at the college level. Moreover, the evidence shows that students who do not take multi-semester developmental coursework are much more likely to complete a degree, a very important outcome that demonstrates the efficacy of an integrated approach for all college students.

To sum up these points regarding students and critical literacy, it should be clear that the majority of students lack the skills needed to succeed in college and beyond. These skills are necessary not only to pass the writing courses that are nearly universally required at most postsecondary institutions but also to pass all the other courses needed for a degree in any field. Moreover, they are essential to participation in a democratic society. These skills are why we want the citizenry to be educated at all. Critical literacy will allow everyone to see, hear, read, and understand all points of view on the array of challenges that confront the country, and citizens can then make their own judgments and decisions based on this information. Only when students can access and assess the information they get from traditional printed sources, as well as from the multitude of resources now available online, can they make informed decisions. Every student, regardless of background or major, deserves the proper instruction to develop these key skills.

What Centers for Teaching and Learning and the Professional and Organizational Development Network Can Do

Due to the recent changes in higher education, including a major shift to online learning and the reform of education, critical literacy skills of today’s generation of college students face the peril of even a greater decline. All students, whether developmental and non-developmental in online and face-to-face environments, need a well-organized, systemic effort of college educators to enhance the students’ critical literacy, including critical thinking, reading, writing, and research skills taught in the integrated manner. However, there is little information available on how faculty collaborate to adjust their pedagogy and make informed curricular decisions under the new circumstances in higher education. What we do know is that disciplinary faculty are generally reluctant and resistant to explicitly incorporating critical literacy skills in their pedagogy, as discussed in the section “Problematic Assumptions About Reading” above. Most STEM departments do not have a clear goal of teaching critical literacy in their disciplines and do not collaborate with their colleagues in English or writing departments who may have relevant expertise (Siegal & Gilliland, 2021). Furthermore, even those English or writing departments that are associated with successful WAC/WID programs do not necessarily collaborate with those faculty members who have and can share college reading expertise.

To address the lack of the unified front in promoting postsecondary critical literacy, a leader is needed to bring together English faculty, general education faculty, and other content area faculty and tackle the goal of teaching integrated critical thinking, reading, writing, and research in various disciplines. Centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) should lead other members of the POD Network, such as department chairs, faculty, graduate students, deans, student services staff, chief academic officers, and educational consultants, in taking the following actions.

It Is Time to Act

Most importantly, all of the above has to be ongoing, sustainable work as opposed to a single training session. In-person and online workshop series, faculty learning communities, and multi-day institutes would be preferred forms of educational development compared to one-off workshops. Problematic assumptions about reading addressed in this article may become the topic for the first workshop in a critical literacy workshop series sponsored by the CTLs and the POD Network. The disciplinary faculty’s reluctance and resistance to incorporate critical literacy in their pedagogy may provide an opportunity to engage them immediately in a discussion about the role of reading, critical thinking, and research skills in their disciplines.

The continuous work to promote integrated reading, writing, critical thinking, and research skills across the curriculum will take time and an exposure to multiple viewpoints of various stakeholders, such as student panels, writing faculty, reading specialists, librarians, publishers, national experts in integrated reading and writing and WAC/WID, or local employers. If administrators can come to see and reward this work in terms of financial support and as a valued part of teaching, research, and service, more faculty will be willing to take the various kinds of training and steps to improve student learning, the outcome everyone wants.

A final note related specifically to college reading: we understand that the landscape for critical reading has changed a lot over the last few years, as a result of both the pandemic’s impact on higher education and the need to help a more diverse population of students with differing levels of ability and preparation. Many of the courses and programs that addressed students’ needs with respect to reading have been modified or eliminated to address these changes. Meanwhile, students’ difficulties with effective and efficient critical reading have not changed. Various kinds of studies, qualitative and quantitative, online and off, show clearly that a majority of students need serious help with reading (ACT, 2017; Stanford History Education Group and Gibson Consulting, 2019; Wineburg et al., 2020). Integrated reading and writing approaches have demonstrated effectiveness that the POD Network can support, particularly in collaboration with CTLs on many campuses. The POD Network can also work with other stakeholders, such as first-year experience programs and especially librarians, to maximize their impact. While better preparation for faculty to teach critical reading would be useful in every discipline, ongoing professional development is key to enabling faculty to make students better readers. A widespread focus on reading must be an ongoing feature of the changing environment in higher education through the work of the POD Network.