12. “I refer to the reading list in sessions and model its use. Every single time. When
students ask me for resources I point them in the direction of the list, too. There is
so far evidence of reading but that might be because I am being more directive –
and nasty (!) if they don’t do it!
“I can’t comment about assignments yet as I am just marking the first one, but I
would say- anecdotally- that they have taken notice and that they are using more
resources.
“They are discussing the texts – in fact I was embarrassed last week as one of them
wanted to discuss an article that I’d forgotten I’d put on there!
“I think it’s good to have web pages and videos on, too; they use these – or say they
do.
“They say they like the fact that it’s obviously me that’s written the list, it’s quite
personal.”
We’ve had Talis Aspire for a number of years now and until the past few months our main task has been to get academic staff managing their own reading lists and advocating the benefits of academic staff managing their own reading lists
We’ve trained X number of staff, have a series of videos on the library website for self-led learning, and the practical training is very much embedded in what we do.
I attended last year’s Talis Insight conference with the aim of talking to staff from other institutions about how they address the issue of creating good quality reading lists. However, it was a talk led by Allie Taylor from the University of Worcester which provided a lightbulb moment. She spoke about a session she has led to cohorts of students on their version of their equivalent of the PG Cert in Academic Practice and to staff at their Learning and Teaching Conference.
The session uses PollEverywhere software to encourage academic staff to think about what they are doing with their reading lists, not just the content they put on them but the potential that they have . It also aims to encourage academics to use reading lists as an academic tool, help students engage with reading and engage with the unit. There are 14 questions in total, here is an example question.
Other questions include:
How do you arrange your reading lists (by week, by theme, alphabetically, in no particular order)
How long are your lists on average?
We ask whether there has been positive or negative feedback about reading lists which gives us an opportunity to talk about the feedback we have had in surveys, teaching sessions.
There is also a quick fire round requiring a true or false response e.g. I tell my students about the reading list, Not all units need a reading list, My reading list reflects current literature in the topic
We decided to run Allie’s session only slightly adapting it to suit our style. We called it ‘Reinvigorating Reading Lists’ (took us half an hour to come up with that) and ran a pilot session in July.
We had nine attendees in all and at the end of the session there were two very enthused Education lecturers chatting to each other about how they could improve their lists, whilst a third signed up for the Aspire session, and we continued the conversation with her the following week!
We only had two evaluation forms returned via MyHR but both were very encouraging and rated the session as excellent, but there were a couple of comments from attendees at the session that they had these lists, but had never considered using them as a pedagogical tool before, and given they’re so central to virtually every unit, it seems daft not to make more use of them.
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One question raised in the session was of how to get students to actually do ANY reading, and it occurred to us that we’re recommending lecturers regularly update their lists, they annotate and they set an importance, but why? We’d naively, given the industry we’re in, not actually looked at any evidence for this – we were only listening to what Talis and other librarians had said, and had adopted Allie’s session without really thinking beyond what that covered.
Once we started looking there’s a wealth of research and advice out there surrounding reading compliance and suggesting methods of increasing engagement. From speaking to lecturers I think there was an idea that this was a relatively new phenomena with the advent of the internet specifically social media meaning students only surface read and don’t engage with anything requiring what’s termed “deep reading”.
However, having turned up quite a lot of reports dating back at least to the 70s, this is obviously a perennial problem. So starting to read around the subject rather than just relying on our own anecdotal evidence has opened a can of worms, and certainly given us much more constructive fodder to include during the sessions.
Following the pilot we also took the opportunity to update the best practice section of our reading list guide for staff to bring it in line with the key messages we are trying to convey in the training,
Janet Lord is a lecturer in Education Studies. She attended the pilot session and also took the opportunity to meet with her subject librarian in order to develop her reading lists.
This is a reading check list we have had for a while and Lyn (Education Studies Subject Librarian) used it when she met with Janet. Lyn was able to help us improve and streamline the checklist based on her meeting.
I think Lyn’s support combined with Janet putting into practice what she learned from the Reinvigorating reading lists session had a big impact especially in terms of reading list usage. We looked at the dashboard statistics and found that for 16/17 there were just 9 items on it and only 84 page views and 33 item clicks
Following Janet’s changes there are now 69 items, it’s organised thematically and usage has soared to a massive 1117 page views and 645 item clicks so far this year!
We were extremely pleased with the usage stats but wanted to know from Janet whether there had been any pedagogical impact so we got in touch and asked whether she’d noticed any change in student engagement with the texts?
Whether students were doing more reading and turning up to lectures/seminars better prepared?
Whether they are discussing the texts with her?
Whether she had noticed any improvement in assignment quality?
Plus we wanted to know whether there were any other improvements or benefits she’d noticed?
Janet also kindly surveyed her students to find out how they had found the unit reading list.
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We made changes to the session by including the examples we got from research about reading list compliance.
We added the 5 most useful articles we found about increasing reading list compliance to our Reading List Guide Best Practice section. We used this evidence to back up some of our reasoning to why it was important to consider Literacy levels, to ask whether the texts being included on the RL are too difficult, to question how readable a book is as well as consider whether there an obvious, beneficial reason to reading the material added.
We also created a handout highlighting the main take away points from the sessions
Mention moving to LTI
And finally, we added a task. We created what we thought was a rubbish list and asked them to work together to suggest improvements they would make based on what we had covered in the session.
We had 3 attendees which was a little disappointing although we had quite a few enquiries about when it would be running again as they couldn’t make that date, however, we have had a flood of departmental enquiries about running away day sessions, so Events Management and Engineering are lined up with several more on the horizon.
So, it’s definitely going in the right direction and it had great feedback although I wouldn’t say we are 100% happy with it just yet and it feels like something which will continually develop.
The plan is to offer additional sessions in the summer (one listed here, other dates TBC) and it will become part of our standard training programme running at least once a term.
