How Much Reading Do You Assign?
At the end of this post is a poll about how much reading you assign. Please take part in it if you teach philosophy courses. Thanks.
“Stop Meeting Students Where They Are” is the title of a recent piece at The Atlantic by Walt Hunter, professor of English at Case Western Reserve University. In it, he shares what are now familiar observations about the state of college student literacy (see this post, for example), lamenting that students don’t read. He was worried. Nonetheless, he assigned lots of readings, and whole books. The result? “I regretted ever doubting my students. I am now convinced that I was wrong to listen to the ostensible wisdom of the day.”
He says:
Two things became clear in the early weeks of class. First, the students were reading. They were reading everything, or most of it. I know this because I had them identify obscure passages, without notes, devices, or books at hand. Second, they were experiencing life in a way that was not easy outside the class and its assignments. They were expected—required—to give huge chunks of time to an activity, reading, that was not monetizing their attention in real time. They had, in effect, taken back their lives, for an hour or two each day. It turned out that American literature, which so often flirts with utopian fantasies of regaining control—hello, Walden!—could do precisely that…
The iterative process of confusion, endurance, and incremental understanding is what literature professors teach when they assign whole books. This march toward understanding doesn’t have a great name other than reading. We need to help students grow into the difficulty of reading. The best way to do that is not to “meet them where they are,” a bromide that has become doctrine for higher education. We have to do as Whitman says instead: Stop somewhere ahead and wait for them to catch up.
The article is inspiring but also a bit frustrating, as it’s unclear why Hunter’s approach worked. He shares only a few details about what he did to increase the odds of success, such as replacing take-home essays with in-class writing. It is unclear how many students he had in his class. He doesn’t acknowledge that Case Western is a prestigious university (sometimes referred to as a “hidden Ivy”) with above-average students, leaving unclear how advisable his approach would be at a typical college. Also, his is a course about fiction, and we might wonder whether he would have been as successful getting students to read nonfiction.
That said, it made me curious as to whether there are philosophy professors who, when teaching undergraduate courses, assign what they recognize to be an unusually heavy amount of reading, and who have had some good experiences or good results doing so. Are most of those students doing most of the reading? How do you assess that? And what do you do to help your students be successful at that?
Below are two poll questions about the amount of reading you assign in undergraduate philosophy courses per week: one about lower-level undergraduate courses, and one about upper-level undergraduate courses. If you teach such courses, please answer the poll. Thanks!
I teach at a regional public 4-year university. About half of my students have been in the U.S. for less than 10 years. I use a collaborative annotation tool called Perusall, which is available as an extension within Canvas and Blackboard, and can be set so that they can’t copy and paste or download the text to a translator or AI summary tool. Perusall measures how much of the reading they’ve completed, and whether they’ve read other students’ comments — an auto-suggests a grade according to the rubric I choose, which leaves me free to choose a few particularly good comments or questions for feedback and/or further discussion.
In Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a government employee has to carefully tailor her reading because she knows that the software she uses tracks her reading. It’s dystopian, and so is what you are describing.
Great response; even better pseudonym.
I am fairly confident that if my first exposure to reading philosophy was accompanied by Perusall (or a similar technology), I never would have fallen in love with philosophy. It would have turned this liberating, invigorating thing into a mere chore.
I worry about these sorts of tracking programs will sap the enjoyment out of reading for those students who might have found a passion for philosophy.
There’s also a collective action problem here. The more reading you assign, the less time students have for their other classes’s readings.
This suggests an interesting norm. As important as it is to get students to read more, you’re also helping contribute to education if you economize on their reading time, so that they can focus on other readings for which there’s no substitute. (This is also a point in favor of writing clear and efficient textbooks. More time for other texts!)
This is straightforwardly true only if the total amount of time that students are willing to spend on reading is independent of the total amount of reading assigned to them—which isn’t obvious!
Indeed, willingness to read depends on how much is assigned. That’s why I put my comment in terms of the total amount of time that students *have*, not the amount of time that students are *willing to give*. Just look at the bit you quoted and read it literally. There’s nothing in there about willingness!
I swear, this kind of uncharitable dunking is why philosophical writing has evolved to be so tedious and referee-proof.
Hand to my heart, I didn’t mean to uncharitably dunk, and sincerely regret that you saw my comment that way!
Rather, by pointing out that the amount of time that students are disposed to spend on reading (to put it more neutrally) is plausibly sensitive to the amount assigned to them, I meant to obliquely refer to a more serious worry: I suspect that the real collective action problem here is that we have lowered expectations to such an extent that instructors who do want to demand a lot of their students tend to be strongly disincentivized from doing so. If we all expected more from our students, everyone (including them) would be better off.
Indeed, I replied in the way I did because it seemed to me—in light of articles like this—that time strictly speaking (as opposed to time alloted to academics rather than socializing or extracurriculars) is so far from being a limiting factor for full-time students that it would’ve been uncharitable to interpret you as viewing it as such!
I agree that you’ve put your finger on a real worry. But even given what you’ve said, I still think it’s a virtue not to waste students’ time with low-ROI readings.
There’s also something to be said for letting students have a life. I’m glad I had time in college to volunteer, join a choir, and so on. Plus there are students who work on the side.
I just don’t believe some of the things Hunter claims. He presents little detail, not data, and talks too much about things that seem irrelevant.
I think Lectric Eye is making a fair point. There’s famous matrix on parenting styles that also relates in some ways to teaching, coaching, managing, etc. One axis is high or low standards; the other axis is high or low support/responsiveness/etc. (there are variations). The best quadrant to be in is high-high. I imagine Hunter is there. The problem, though, is he only tells us about his high standards, whereas so much of the craft of teaching is figuring out the high support/responsiveness (without burning yourself out). I’m curious to know exactly what he did on that axis to make it work.
“Pages” of reading is an odd metric to use. Five pages of an intro to ethics textbook and five pages of Husserl are night and day. I could read the first in a few minutes and spend an hour parsing the second.
I’m usually not a fan of forced-choice surveys, especially when we’re assessing something with as many variables as reading assignments. I understand why people use them (who wants to code dozens of free response comments?) but I’m skeptical that page counts will tell us much.
I assign about the same number of pages (often the same articles) in my lower and upper level undergraduate classes but my expectations are very different between them. If I’m assigning Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, I’m going to expect lower level students to get the gist of the chapter, maybe something about the demandigness concern, higher and lower pleasures, etc. For upper level students, understanding the gist is the starting point. I’d expect deeper understanding (e.g., the justification for hedonism, the nature and role of competent judges, a finer understanding of higher pleasures as forms of distinctly human activity and not just as another form of pleasure, etc). Critical engagement with the text and its arguments would dominate. Page counts don’t capture any of that.
Justin’s points about population are correct (results from Case Western won’t generalize too widely). I’m willing to bet that students in smaller classes with more personal time with their professors will do more reading than students in large classes (it would be interesting to see if discussion sections make a difference toward reading for students in large classes).
Yes, I’ll regularly assign up to 75-80 pages of textbook reading per week in lower-level courses, but rarely more than 50-60 (roughly two serious papers) per week in upper-level courses — and often less if we’re reading particularly dense stuff.
I’m hopeful that in some contexts, we might be able to have surveys with more free response questions, and use automated text-processing systems to parse them in ways that allow for several different quantitative measures. Just as some high end digital cameras now have a way of capturing light that allows us to choose the depth of focus after the picture is captured, we might be able to capture survey responses in a way that allows us to operationalize the questions of interest after the results are captured (without requiring a human to read several hundred responses and re-code them each time).
I get the impression, increasingly, that first year undergrads are just not inclined to allocate attention to anything that is not in bite-sized TikTok or Facebook reels format, and even then, it has to be really no more than 7 to 10 seconds (for example, videos of someone doing a quick skateboard trick, or of a quick prank, or a sped up version of cooking a steak, or a before and after make up application, etc). Rather than to huff and puff and say please read 40 pages of David Lewis, I’ve just resigned myself to preparing short flashy video thingys and hope that they will watch them. Given the 7 – 10 second limit, though, you have to be quick: for example, my Rawls video thingy has someone removing a veil and shouting ‘VEIL OF IGNORANCE’ (neon letters) and then each neon letter stacks perfectly on the last one (to keep them watching). I am trying to make one for the doctrine of double effect but it’s honestly not easy keeping this in such a bite sized video. Anyway, if we want them to engage, this is what we need to do it seems.
I must admit I’m a little confused by this. What are the students learning in the video mentioned… just the term “Veil of Ignorance”? Is it the intro/paired with actual discussion of what that means and Rawls’ arguments, or is it just learning that the words token a thing that is philosophy?
I too try to make my material attention-grabbing, by using on-topic SMBC-Comics, or creating (hopefully) interesting and attention-grabbing banners for the class learning management page (where they access the articles, etc). But this is a supplement to them actually reading the material and answering questions about it.
I think I’m just missing something, so I would love for you to elaborate. (oh! Maybe this was sarcastic and I just missed that?)
Hi Emerson, fair question – sadly I haven’t been able to get them to pay attention long to get very far. So in the short Facebook reel-style videos, they’ll get 7-10 seconds of associative learning (Rawls + veil of ignorance) but their attention wanes quickly. I’ve tried making videos that lead in to other videos (that give more content) but it’s hard given that even explanations that require more than a few sentences seem to lose their attention/focus. So they don’t really know what the veil of ignorance is other than it comes from “Rawls”; I’ve lowered my expectations quite a bit, even over just the last few years, so that now the questions will be like “True or false, Rawls came up with the Veil of Ignorance” (and the students will write “T”). That’s about it. It’s a sad state of affairs.
Is this really what things have come to? I mean, how is this even teaching philosophy?
Tryon, I wonder the same thing myself. But let’s seriously think a minute about the very presupposition here that teaching philosophy (at least as we are used to doing so, from when we were students in days before social media) is still possible. I guess from what I’ve seen, the attention spans are so short now (and indexed almost entirely to quick bitesized video reels of 10 seconds max) that we have to do a bit of ‘non-ideal theory’ here and just work with what we’ve got. So I think that we face a kind of decision problem: for kids with attention spans like this, if we give them McTaggart on the unreality of time and say to read the article, they will read none of it (at most they’ll ask ChatGPT for a super quick summary in one sentence), and lord knows they might not properly read that full sentence and think about it- but if we try to ‘meet them where they are’ with some bite sized short video reels , we can at the very least put our selves in a position to reach them – (even if at an attenuated level of intellectual sophistication!) my suggestion is that we go with the latter , which gives us something very small, rather than the former which gets us nothing. Realism rather than idealism I suppose!
I apologize, I’m not trying to be dense. But I cannot fathom what possible use generative factoids like “Rawls – Veil of Ignorance!” could possibly be to anyone, devoid of all content and context as it is.
I can’t imagine students — initially unsure whether philosophy is useful, interesting, etc. but deciding to take a class because why not — coming away with anything other than disdain for the subject and a strong belief that it’s completely useless. Just memorizing a bunch of pointless factoids.
I apologize for the harshness (almost incredulousness) of my comments.
I suppose it’s not all factoids… I made the students a five-second Facebook reel to illustrate Ockham’s Razor: someone needs to shave; fifty razors suddenly appear; the person looks baffled; then all but one razor vanish, and “simplest is best!” flashes on screen as they smile. All in five seconds. I’m cautiously optimistic they got the idea. I tried something similar for Hume’s Fork, though that one… didn’t quite land in the same way.
I must admit that these are extremely imaginative!
I continue to be curious… wondering what lecture and class discussion looks like in this course? Do students engage during discussion; have interesting questions/comments? Are Rawls’ ideas unpacked during lecture? Or is the class entirely online?
Another good question! So the situation in person is (to cut to the chase) that they just play on their phones (if they show up at all) and I speak into the void while they’re ‘phubbing’ me (a new term I learned when someone plays on their phone while you’re talking to them. Obviously I said on the first day of class that I have a no-phones policy in class, however several students pointed out that I’m technically not allowed to prevent them from having them in class (given university policy – students can’t be banned from having phones on them). In light of that Uni wide policy, we are supposed to ’embrace responsible technology use’ rather than ‘ban’ technology, etc, etc. Of course, then tried asking that they please not have them out at least while I’m lecturing, but (the same students, incidentally) pointed out that they are permitted to use phones to ‘take notes’ because they have anxiety. If I were a betting woman, I would bet that they were NOT taking notes but rather playing Candy Crush or whatever they do. Anyway, to answer your question, lectures involve me giving powerpoint presentations while the students phubb me; and, when I ask questions, I get a few blank stares, but mostly, they are still on their phones and texting and not even listening to the questions. It’s really wish I coudl ban phones, obviously, but here’s where we are – hence, my phone is at least to try to ‘reach them’ through these video reels I make outside of class. (I hope it goes without saying that the essays I’ve graded are almost universally ChatGPT generated – which is dispiriting).
You know, I initially wanted to believe that your accounts of your teaching were false. Now I want to believe that they’re true—that you’re (not unheroically) meeting the absurd with the absurd.
These comments by P. Proudfoot are satirical; at any rate, I hope so. (I’m not a professor or instructor of any sort, but one doesn’t have to be to reach this conclusion.)
I wish that were so, Louis, but if you want to test this hypothesis scientifically, give a kid a philosophy book and tell them to read it, and watch what happens. Now, do the same thing with a Facebook reel . I can tell you a priori what is going to happen, and it ain’t satire … (it also ain’t going to involve that kid reading that book)
You are the Ken M of this comments section.
It’s hard for me to know how well my students do the reading (what I assign varies by course), but yes, like in the article, I certainly also do in-class essay tests. I also learned to introduce the reading before it is assigned. I think this helps a lot.
I then ask them to comment on the assigned reading each time on a class blog, and that helps. It takes effort to pretend to have read it, anyway.
And I ask a lot of questions in class that depend on the reading, and that helps. They care about seeming informed to each other. I learned from my kid in college that they will (at his school) do heavy reading so as not to embarrass themselves in front of other students in class (I don’t require heavy reading at a city/state school). Anyway, one reason I focus on getting them to do the reading is that it seems to contribute to the general atmosphere in the class. As in, are we here to learn things or not?
Hard to answer this question. There’s the minimum amount of reading that they need to get by (reflected in the starred texts) and the wide range of articles and books that I suggest in case they get interested and get the bit between their teeth. Also in my ‘Why Be Moral?’ class in which we explore the title question (in part) though major works of fiction, I recommend movie or TV adaptations a) if they available and b) if I think they are okay (so NOT The Hollow Crown for Shakespeare). That way they don’t have to plough their way through every word of six novels (two of which are decidedly hefty) plus four Shakespeare plays in one half of a semester. The evidence of essays in the Pre-AI era suggests that the students do read substantial chunks of at least some of these texts.
20-30 at lower levels, 30-40 at higher levels. I have never had much patience for excessive reading loads, either in philosophy or elsewhere, but especially in philosophy, where we expect students to read very closely indeed.
I once filled in mid-semester for a colleague (who later died, sadly) who had assigned a textbook full of 1-5 page extracts from articles and books. That was a demoralizing experience. For one thing, the readings lacked too much context to make much sense. For another, just as many students weren’t reading them.
My preference is to give a manageable amount of reading. Those who are interested will do it, and be challenged by it. And those who aren’t either can do it without too much pain, or won’t anyway. But I see no point making everything awful for everyone, one way or the other.
(Not least me–no way am I reviewing my notes on a hundred pages of reading times eight to eleven courses!)
My two cents–
While I do not share the same experience as Hunter’s, I can see the point. This is because my students at a public state university only read for joy and (some level of) inspiration. They expect to read novels, stories, poems, and literature in the broad sense, in all classes in humanities. They cannot handle philosophical arguments. They often describe philosophical texts as boring, dry, not relatable, etc. and quickly lose interest in reading them. (They still like talking about philosophy in class if I present the argument to them. They just do not want to read the texts themselves.) They seem to be so used to find inspirations by picking up some quotes and talk about how they like or dislike them, but they are so not used to read back and forth between pages and figure out what is going on.
For example, when we read the Daodejing, I felt that many students actually did the reading. They were able to identify some chapters they felt especially related to and to share how they interpret them. This is kind of similar to Hunter’s experience. But if we were talking about Plato or Spinoza, I could just see that they did not read at all (maybe they tried one page and gave up).
Another struggle I have is that I started to feel that for many students, whether they did the reading or not would not make a big difference: they would not understand the text anyways. We often did in class reading exercises, and many students just totally misunderstood some texts that appeared very straightforward to me. I have no idea how to handle this.
I wonder if you have tried lecturing on the reading before they do it, not just presenting the argument but highlighting “what is coming” in the reading?
Though I doubt some of Hunter’s claims, I’m sympathetic to the general thrust of the piece. I know a lot of my colleagues have dramatically shortened the readings they assigned to students–assigning only a few pages of not very dense material, even just a “1,000 word philosophy” piece for a whole class. I worry that if the reading is too short, then students just won’t think it’s worth reading, or plan to read it in the last 5 minutes before class (and may or may not actually end up doing so). So, I try to make the reading sufficiently beefy that students actually feel the need to carve out some time to read it. My impression (whatever that’s worth) is that this works reasonably well.
One thing I try to teach my students–and I have no idea how effective I am at doing so–is not to try to do all their reading in one go, especially the night before class. That’s a recipe for getting bored or overwhelmed and giving up. Instead, I encourage them to break it up into chunks they find manageable. If that’s five pages at a time/an hour, then over four days that’s twenty pages done, and a full thirty-five over the week. They will get more done by being consistent than by being heroic.
Of course, if some cranky prof assigns a 500-page book every week, then balancing out that reading and mine is going to start looking overwhelming again.
(I remember what it’s like taking six courses at a time. At some point, you have to triage your workload. I don’t blame them for doing that, when they do it. But I keep reminding them that consistent progress adds up fast.)
Can only really speak for my experience of teaching second- and third-year undergraduates. It’s my personal preference that textbooks and anthologies should be relied upon as a supplementary material rather than a required reading, purely because sourcing textbooks can be costly, and very few cater to the range of topics I cover in my courses.
However, that’s just a personal preference. My thought is that I buy the textbooks I recommend in order to draw on them for lectures and handouts, so they get all the key information but still know where to go if they need further clarification or if my handouts aren’t enough.
Instead, I’ll almost exclusively make one or two (at most) journal articles the required reading. Usually I aim for between 20-30 pages, but ideally no more than 25 a week, so as not to overwhelm them or detract focus from their other modules.
However, I’ll also go to the effort of suggesting multiple other recommended readings, which will include journal articles, podcasts, blog pages, video essays, and recordings of research/conference talks. I think this kind of variety meets the needs for accessibility while still being sufficiently informative and engaging.
Just pointing out the obvious: weekly standards diverge wildly across countries and educational systems, and the above poll doesn’t explicitly say it’s just for US educators.
Workload for, say, a 3 ECTS class in an European system is bound to be smaller than for a typical philosophy class in the US system.
I assign more readings than most of my peers, but it’s relative to the system and local norms. Students remark on the workload, as well. There are guidelines about how many hours of work one ECTS credit is supposed to be, so I ask students if they estimate it talkes them more hours than that. So far they haven’t answered in the affirmative, so I remain ‘in the clear’. It appears that students set their expectations by comparison to other instructors who assign less work (or even just do lecture + exam), rather than by referring to the written guidelines.
Still, my experience is that the students do read, and they’re happy to get a challenge. I take the time to explain why I assigned that specific reading and why it matters – that might help avoid demoralization. To help them, I give them “support questions”, which are a bit like a pop quiz except you don’t turn it in. It’s supposed to help them gauge their own understanding. The gist is that if they find the answers to those questions from the text, they’ve understood the main points of the text. Students often feel baffled when reading, say, Aristotle for the first time, so the support questions are designed to help them recognize that they did get the main points. These are then worked through together in class.
I have some ‘required’ reading and then more ‘additional’ reading. The latter can be quite long. I try to keep the first short. This semester, I have what’s largely an applied ethics class, so many readings come from places like The Journal of Medical Ethics – which means they’re often around 5 pages.
This isn’t simply a worry that the students won’t read more, but also I want to emphasise to them that it’s quality rather than quantity that matters. If I assigned a lot of reading, then some might skim it all, but not really understand it. I would rather they read a little material well.
just my two cents from a not very huge sample. I taught some courses where I assigned a lot of reading, and I taught some where I assigned very little and tried to do a lot more “meeting students where they are.” Here’s what I observed:
so from my limited experience, I feel that “meeting students where they are” amounts to fail to meet with more students. It does, however, signal to the very engaged students something not very great. My explanation would be that we are signalling that the expectations are very low.
Just want to say that this completely rings true to me of my students (KCL). I’d never quite articulated it, I think, so thank you for doing so.
Something I found helpful in ensuring students do the reading every class were in-class multiple-choice quizzes every time there was a new reading, and make them cumulatively worth a non-negligible portion of the grade. (20% this last semester.) Separately, I aimed to keep each reading at the 15-20 page mark and gave them ‘reading questions’ for a sense of what to focus on.
I’ve noticed the discussions substantively improve in the semesters I’ve done the quizzes, presumably because the students actually did the reading beforehand and came up with interesting thoughts in the process.
This semester in my lower-level course I’ve been experimenting with assigning only 2-3 pages of excerpts per class. At my institution, many students were simply not doing longer readings and were relying on AI summaries instead. My thought was that if I assign roughly the amount they would otherwise read in summary form, I at least get them engaging with the primary text itself.
I’ve also started building in occasional in-class reading time so we can work carefully through a dense page or two together and practice close reading. It’s something of a pedagogical compromise (and I admit the whole enterprise feels a bit like a Faustian bargain), but so far the quality of discussion suggests that more students are actually encountering the text.