LACOL administered a survey of faculty and staff from member institutions on observed reading practices amongst their students in the fall of 2016. This survey summary was generated using Google's Cloud Natural Language API and Visuzalization API.
These summaries were generated from Google's Cloud Natural Language API. This service uses machine learning models to extract key ideas from large bodies of text. By feeding the API all of the responses to each question, we were able to distill the main points of agreement across those responses (with some minor editing). The resulting text is partially generated by the algorithm, with some text taken directly from survey responses.
Novels, critical pieces, narrative theory, poetry, short fiction, essays.
Academic monographs, academic articles, primary source documents.
"Primary" historical documents.
Journal articles.
Close reading, deep reading, engaged reading
To understand how experiments were performed and interpreted in the primary literature.
Our majors should be able to read a primary literature article and know where the various types of information are found and be able to distinguish experimental observations from the authors' opinions and conjecture.
Critical reading, comprehensive reading of secondary materials, critical thinking.
Greek and Latin texts in English translation.
Close reading and effective skimming of secondary works of a historical/analytical nature and historical documents.
Sustained and deep attention while fostering reading appreciation.
Assigning a combination of book chapters and books.
Encouraging reading with empathy and imagination.
Assigning current events stories and op-eds.
I talk about how to figure out what an academic book "says" without having to read the whole book (i.e., looking at the title, table of contents, index, skimming the preface or intro, etc). I have provided workshops on various reading techniques as well.
I assign exercises like "keyword" assignments, key character, key scene, etc.
Modeling, explicit teaching, asking discussion questions that demand they apply certain reading techniques.
Requesting note taking and demonstrating for them how to do note taking effectively.
I haven't used any online tools. I'm curious about them, however.
I'm old school. I don't know.
I am generally not comfortable with online tools and technology.
It's not different in kind from commenting via old-fashioned hand-writing, but I do like the flexibility and patterns (color-coding, different kinds of comments or notes for different kinds of questions or issues) technologies offer.
Hard copy.
As purchased books available from the bookstore (or other outlets).
Moodle.
I ask the students to purchase book-length texts and make shorter texts available on-line (we use Moodle).
Whenever possible, students purchase books.
Course packet and on-line course website.
I have participated in some of the W3C Annotation Framework meetings focused on creating interoperable standards for text annotation tools.
I can't really tell. But I am still very unclear about how electronic texts and material texts are read differently, absorbed differently.
Electronic access certainly addresses financial concerns.
Students in my experience do not annotate electronic readings, which is a minus.
Students certainly read and view lots of micro-content.
I think students read a lot today but in multimodal ways.
Much more reading online today.
Our perceptions of their reading habits are untrustworthy in various ways.
I know that many students prefer hard copies of text books and papers to electronic versions.