Everyone I know is concerned that college students aren’t reading. Some of my community college students have shared with me that they’ve NEVER been to a library(!), their parents have never had a book in the home (other than a phone book), and no one read to them as a child. But I’m not bucking for sympathy here. Primary, secondary and post-secondary instructors have been fighting this battle for decades… and with everything available with the flick of a thumb or tap of a screen, I’m not sure that we’ll be seeing the “joy of reading” that I remember as a kid. So let’s get practical.

Several years ago, I talked to a colleague, James D. and asked him how he got his students to read. He told me that he’d gotten a hint from Paula A. about something he called a “mini-quiz” that she might have gotten from some kind of a one-minute professional style book. He showed me how he’d adapted it to his literature and humanities courses. Initially I thought, “Are you kidding? You want me to make, collect, grade and post grades for a quiz every week or several times a week in every class? Holy mackerel. My workload sucks already.” Still, I had to admit that I was looking for a solution and he’d just handed me one.

Although I wasn’t sure this would work in skills-based courses like the courses I often teach, I immediately tried it in my developmental- and transfer-level composition courses. It worked. In fact, it worked so well that I implemented it for EVERY course I taught and still use it now years later. The content comes directly from the textbook. Sometimes when I have a whiny class, I make a key for myself with the page numbers from where I pulled the material. Hey, they’re easy questions. You may even laugh at how easy they are. And they’re multiple choice, so they’re easy to grade. I even (gulp) bought a coffee table with a lip so that I could line them up a dozen across and grade quickly. Later, I started making 2 different quizzes using columns on a standard letter size document, cutting them down, collating them, and distributing them (to discourage cheating). Here’s the funny part—in student surveys, my students constantly mention “daily quizzes” when asked what they HATED THE MOST about my courses. In the same breath, they then answer “daily quizzes” when asked what ENCOURAGED them to do class reading. Heh heh. It’s beautiful. 

Here’s what several of my quizzes look like:

Once I created a simple template, it was super easy to customize them for each course. I chop up required reading and quiz students on every 10 or 20 pages or so. In fact, in every day of my courses, if something is not due at the start of the class period, there is a mini-quiz on the course outline for that class session. If students are late, they don’t get to do a quiz. This means that students are encouraged to be on time AND do the reading. My class discussions, team work, and assignments are so, so, so(!) much better since I implemented this. Although students know that all the quizzes they do all semester only counts for 10% of their final grade, they will break their backs to get these done. It’s interesting. And it really, really works. 

If you’ve got some ideas about how you get your students to read, let me know. It’s a tough nut to crack!