USG Teaching & Learning Conference: Best Practices for Promoting Engaged Student

Candace Timpte, Peter Sakaris, Lee Kurtz, Mark Schleuter, Jill Penn, Latanya Hammonds-Odie

Successful students must be able to comprehend and summarize their college level reading assignments and critical thinking can begin only after readers have information and knowledge. Faculty members frequently note that students either do not read or have difficulty reading. Moreover, students frequently report that college level texts are difficult to read. In this study, students read a passage with a time limit, summarized the passage and answered comprehension questions. Student reading scores are analyzed with respect to number of college hours completed, GPA, ethnicity, English as a second language skills and other metrics. Since successful science students must understand and interpret literature that uses technical language appropriate to the field, we hope to document correlations between reading comprehension and student success in order to better understand difficulties STEM students encounter.