Beyond Reading: strategies to aid student engagment, comprehension, and retention of core texts
Bruce Leroy

Helping students improve their understanding, comprehension, and retention of information in course texts is crucial to learning. Most instructors in both undergraduate and graduate education utilize "required" textbooks or other core readings to provide students with a foundational understanding of their subject matter. The assumption is that students read, comprehend, and retain the material contained in these works. However, these texts frequently contain numerous complex concepts that are difficult to understand, use specialized terminology, or are not well-written. Many students feel overwhelmed by the volume and difficulty of the material and may become frustrated by their inability to identify key concepts and glean the essential information.  

The goals of the proposed FLC are to:

• Provide a safe, open, challenging, enjoyable forum for faculty from diverse disciplines to share strategies for improving comprehension and retention as well as aiding the development of new approaches;
• Develop a list of key techniques students can use to facilitate their understanding and retention of complicated texts as well as how faculty can nurture development of these skills in students;
• Promote development of student-driven self-assessment strategies for gauging progress in developing these techniques;
• Develop a methodology to measure end-points/outcomes that would allow assessment of achievement of these goals by students.

Please contact Dr. LeRoy (bleroy@uga.edu) for more information.

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This page last updated on February 22, 2008.