Tips for engagement
Sandris Zeivots reported that "up to 80% of uni students don’t read their assigned readings."
Over the past two decades educators have raised concerns about changing patterns of student motivation, engagement and comprehension of academic reading. The power of technology, media and apps have affected student reading patterns. -- Zeivots, S. (2021). Up to 80% of uni students don’t read their assigned readings. Here are 6 helpful tips for teachers. The Conversation.
Explore Zeivots's tips for increasing student engagement and the supporting Resource List features:
Tip 1:
Students participate in pre-class activities online
Use the Class preparation tag so they can easily see which resources should be read before class.
See the Adding tags and notes page for more information.
Set a due date on an item to flag it with students. You can do this by editing the item and choosing a date from the calendar.
Students will be able to:
- Filter the list to items with due dates.
- See due date on the item.
- See a notification on the calendar icon on the right side of the window.
- Students will also receive an email notification:
Tip 2:
Offer clear expectations and strategies on what, how and why to read
If you don’t have a Resource List – start using one. Presenting a curated list to students identifies what they should be reading and provides ease of access to the resources. If reading engagement is the main objective, then get that “finding and accessing” barrier out of the way.
Benefits for students:
- Consistent student experience.
- View all subject resources in one place.
- Accessed directly from the subject site in iLearn.
- No need to sign in a second time to access the Library's subscription content.
- Students can actively engage with the list by marking items as done and suggesting resources.
- Keep private notes about readings.
Talk to your faculty librarian for support, or just get started with a list via iLearn. It's easier than you might think.
Use tags to easily label a resource as prescribed, recommended, in-class or class-preparation. Students become familiar with these tags across their various resource lists, and immediately get an idea of how you expect them to use each resource.
See the Adding tags and notes page for more information.
Use public notes to provide more detail about your expectations if you want to get very specific about your expectations or advice on how and why they should read. You might tell them to skim through some sections and which parts they should focus on for a specific concept.
See the Adding tags and notes page for more information.
Tip 3:
Gradually increase informed learning concepts and strategies to help students develop critical and creative academic skills
Student suggestions
Ask students to find and evaluate other resources to add to the resource list. Students can add items to their Favourites, then use the Suggest option draw it to your attention and explain why they are recommending it. You can then add the resource to the list easily.
Tip 4:
Provide a safe space for students to clarify confusing aspects
Class Discussions
For items with PDFs attached, use the Class Discussions feature to encourage engagement with the resource. Students can use class discussions to:
- ask questions
- help each other to clarify concepts
- collaborate on evaluating a resource
If the PDF is your own work and you or Bond University owns the copyright then this is an ideal type of file for this purpose. Talk to your faculty librarian if you would like your class to use this feature on articles that are not your own work.
Tip 5:
Gradually introduce technical terms and cognitive load
The analytics in the resource list system show student engagement (Activity Score) is generally higher in lists where there are fewer than 20 or so items.
Reducing the number of items on a list is not the only solution to increase student engagement. Instead try using features such as section visibility dates and descriptions, item tags and notes to reduce the cognitive load required for students to interpret a list.
Consider the size of your list. Are students overwhelmed with the number of sections or items? Think about how it could be organised or released incrementally to minimise cognitive overload. For example, you can set visibility dates on sections to release them to students throughout the semester instead of all at once.
Section descriptions can provide guidance to students on which resources they are expected to read or view, for example:
- Section descriptions can indicate to students optional resources for students who want to explore in more detail, but are not required.
- If students have a choice of topics for an assessment item then a section with a description for each topic will help. That way they can focus on the readings in their chosen topic.
- Or if your class is undertaking group work and you are dividing up topics per group, then organising resources into group sections will be useful.
