The paradox of textbooks

During a recent online workshop, I wanted to introduce the idea that students might need help organizing the new information they encounter in our courses. I told the faculty in the room to imagine they were going to sit down with some friends to play a board and when they opened the game's rulebook, they were confronted with this:

I asked the workshop participants to share an emoji in the chat that represented how they felt about that. Here's a recreation of their responses:

Then I said, "Now you know how many of our students feel when they open their textbooks."

The two-page spread above is from the rulebook for the 2019 board game Barrage, a game about hydroelectric power that I've been learning to play lately. Like a textbook, a board game's rulebook is designed to teach something to its readers but, also like a textbook, many of those readers find learning from such a document challenging.

It's true that many board game rulebooks aren't designed well for teaching (see Dean Ray Johnson's recent white paper, "Every Board Game Rulebook Is Awful" for an exploration of this), but the rulebook for Barrage is actually pretty useful. That two-page spread, for instance, provides a big picture view of the game that's a useful structure on which to hang all the various mechanics of the game explained on subsequent rulebook pages. That's good teaching, but it's still daunting to take on the challenge of learning the game by reading the rulebook.

This is why we don't just hand our students a textbook and say, "Go learn this stuff." We don't depend on a textbook to do all the work teaching students. I am, however, struck by the paradox of textbooks: They're designed to teach, but students often find them hard to learn from.

Many students don't even try. How often do you hear the complaint from colleagues that students don't do the reading? In the early 2000s, the consensus was that only 20 to 30% of students will read in advance of class when asked by their instructors. I don't know if that percentage has increased since then, but one 2010 study indicates it has gone down, reporting just 18% of students doing the reading before class.

There are lots of reasons students don't do the reading, of course. They have jobs and laundry and caregiving responsibilities and pickleball and other courses competing for their time, among many other things. The volume of reading is a factor, too. Years ago at Vanderbilt, I heard a history major on a panel say that if a professor assigns 50 pages of reading, she knows she won't finish it, so she doesn't even start. But a 10-page assignment? That she would read.

We can't do much about some of the reasons students don't do the reading, but when it comes to the cognitive load of reading a textbook, we do have some options other than just reducing the amount of reading. Here are some promising practices:

Reading Guides

I learned about this approach from Robert (Flipped Learning) Talbert, who would create written guides for his math students to use as they read their textbooks. These guides direct students attention to key concepts in the reading and provide questions for students to work through as they read. Here's an example from a calculus course, one that used both a textbook and videos that Robert created. One thing I really like about Robert's guides is that he identifies for students two categories of learning objectives: ones they should be able to meet before class based on the pre-class work and ones they will be able to meet after class.

Friend of the podcast Justin Shaffer uses reading guides in his biology courses. In his 2017 study of those reading guides, he found that more than 80% of his students completed the guides before class and that full completion of the reading guides was "significantly positively correlated with exam performance." On Justin's website, you can see lots of examples of reading guides he's used in his courses, and you can download a Microsoft Word template for designing your own reading guides.

Social Annotation

Where a reading guide provides assistance from an instructor, social annotation creates opportunities for students to assist each other with the reading. The strategy here is to use a digital platform where students can collaborative annotate the textbook, highlighting passages and attaching comments or questions to those passages. You can end up with a miniature discussion board anchored to the parts of the reading that students find most interesting or most confusing or most provocative or most frustrating.

As annotation scholar Remi Kalir said when I interviewed him for the old Leading Lines podcast, this anchoring can be powerful:

The platform Perusall has built its business on social annotation of textbooks, but depending on the copyright status of what you're asking your students to read, other tools like Hypothesis and NowComment and even Google Docs can do the job well.

I loaded an entire novel, released under a Creative Commons license, to my annotation tool a few years ago, and I found that student engagement with the reading was very satisfying when they read and annotated collaboratively. You can read about my experiments with social annotation on my blog.

AI Reading Assistants

This is not a strategy I could have suggested 12 months ago! But generative AI is pretty good at summarizing information and answering questions when given a set of text to work with. See these studies for some research in this area.

Earlier this year I interviewed Sravanti Kantheti on the podcast, who talked about her use of Top Hat Ace, an AI reading assistant that helps her students make sense of the readings in her course. Sravanti reported that Ace does a great job answering student questions about course material, in the sense that the answers it provides are correct and appropriate to the level of the course. Her topic, anatomy and physiology, can be taught on a third grade level or a medical school level, but she needs her students to encounter explanations that work for beginning undergraduate students, and Top Hat Ace does just that.

When I asked some colleagues about AI reading assistants in the recent "Take It or Leave It" episode of my podcast, panelists Stacey Johnson and Emily Donahoe had some concerns about AI reading assistants doing too much of the heavy lifting of reading for students, but panelist Lance Eaton spoke eloquently about the challenges he faces when reading and how an AI reading assistant could be quite useful to him and to students who found reading assignments difficult. Listen here starting at the 36-minute mark.

Other Strategies

Earlier this week, I mentioned on LinkedIn and BlueSky that I would be writing about textbooks, and I invited colleagues to share about the role of textbooks in their courses. Here are a few of the responses I received:

• Mathematician Drew Lewis said that he recommends a few free textbooks to students in his syllabus, but the only required resource is an activity book he uses to support team-based inquiry learning in the classroom. The activity books he uses are open resources, so you can use them, too! This approach integrates "the reading" tightly with what happens in course.
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• Biologist Jenni Momsen also uses an open resource, one of the free OpenStax textbooks, supplemented with Crash Course videos produced by Hank and John Green and their team. She uses reading guides, as described above, "to help learners capture the big ideas." Plus, class activities are predicated on students doing the reading.
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• Computer scientist Alark Joshi uses team-based learning in his courses, which requires students do the reading before class. Students complete a quiz over the reading during class, first individually and then with their team. Alark writes, "The team quiz is an opportunity for discussion and to get misunderstandings clarified."
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• Math instructor and alternative grading evangelist Sharona Krinsky uses a "system" with an e-textbook, lots of videos, and homework tools. There are pre-class reading (and viewing) assignments, with in-class polling questions for accountability. She says that students could skip purchasing the system ($97 US), but "our experience is that students who don't buy it, don't pass."

On that note, I'll also share a resource that my former Vanderbilt colleague Stacey Johnson wrote (and recently reminded me about), "Digital Textbooks: Working with Publisher-Provided Online Platforms." The guide offers a wealth of advice for making the most of the digital textbook tools available from most publishers.

I also heard from Robert (Flipped Learning) Talbert in response to my query. For his discrete math course, he now uses a wiki that he made, full of articles and videos on the topics in the course. He recommends a free online textbook to his students, but using it is optional. I asked him if he still uses reading guides with new resource, and he said, "I do. It's now called... homework."

There you have some ideas for helping students get more out of their textbooks. What advice do you have on this topic? Do you even use textbooks at all anymore? Send me your thoughts, and I'll share some of them in a future newsletter.

Thanks for reading!

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