When I began teaching in 2002, I was surprised to find so many students coming to class without completing (often, without even starting) their reading assignments. Why didn’t they read? How could they expect to succeed? Further, what should I do? Were my expectations naive, or was a bigger issue at play? I listened and looked – and I found that I was not alone.

Rather than repeating content during class (one fallback lecturing approach), I decided to create and post Microsoft Word outlines for students to complete while reading. I thought that my questions about major points would lighten their burden by helping them understand my take on important issues, gently helping them comprehend major aspects while they skimmed minor aspects.

That turned out to be too gentle: I heard “if you don’t grade it, I won’t do it,” so I began assigning points to the outlines. I strove to find enough incentive to encourage participation without overwhelming the impact of deeper assessment later each in lesson. I also provided limited feedback during grading, hoping again to aid learning.

My grading load grew too much to bear, and many students ignored my feedback anyway. Would students accept a random set of questions sampled from the outlines? This approach worked fairly well for a while, but I started hearing “Not fair! You picked the one question I didn’t understand!”

I decided on an experiment – I converted outlines in one class to online Moodle quizzes including a variety of multiple-choice, matching, true-false, and short-answer questions. Feedback was carefully integrated, and I sprinkled in some higher-level thinking questions among the simpler recall and understand questions. The experiment was costly – about seven hours of my work to create each study guide – but it was very well received and immensely easy to grade. Over the next three semesters, I converted all of the rest of my courses.

The next improvement: an added open-ended ungraded essay question at the end of each study guide quiz. This gave students a chance to tell me about unclear concepts and to ask for help. This slowed my grading a bit, but I believe it has been well worth the extra work: student responses now guide our classroom discussions.

This semester I’m again trying an adjustment – a limit of three attempts at each study guide (to discourage blind guessing) and a link that blocks later assignments until students achieve a minimum quality threshold. Still I find that not all students complete the study guides, so I have extra work to do to provide late completers access to their homework.

I believe students are now reading (or at least skimming) more, are better prepared, and are learning more effectively. The journey continues…