Reading expectation survey

While widespread attention on students' inadequate communication skills provided the larger philosophical context for the project described below, the specific, highly pragmatic, day-to-day concern with teaching prompted our investigation. We knew that too many of our students could not write, and we hypothesized that at least one of the reasons they could not write well was that they did not read. The assumption that they did not read explained another difficulty we and our colleagues met nearly every day in the classroom-the students' lack of context and background on which to build new learning. The project is pedagogically significant. Teaching proceeds by building on what students know; certain common reading experiences contribute heavily to that body of assumed common understanding; if students do not have that specific reading experience, several alternatives follow: (1) teachers must provide that experience in college; (2) students must be directed to acquire that experience before entering; or (3) teachers must operate on a different set of assumptions, perhaps that students are reading but not reading what their teachers assume they are reading or would like them to read. We needed to determine freshmen students' reading habits-what they had read and were reading-and what their specific reading backgrounds were. Moreover, we needed to find out (1) what instructors thought freshmen had read and (2) what instructors thought freshmen should have read

Linguistics · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Reading (process · Education and Critical Thinking Development · Educational Strategies and Epistemologies · Psychology