Reading Preparation for Tutorials

Wendy Grace

The issue of how to encourage active student participation in tutorials often overlooks a more fundamental problem: many students arrive unprepared in the first place, having failed to complete the required reading for that week. In units offered by the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, students are assigned a fairly substantial amount of reading each week in preparation for the tutorial.

These readings may be excerpts from a book by a particular author, or self-contained articles and whole chapters from an edited collection. The fact that students often fail to complete the required reading is confirmed by a survey conducted in May 2007. This situation raises considerable challenges for the Faculty.

The survey was conducted in the form of a questionnaire distributed to students enrolled in French Intellectuals and Literary History (H2221) – a unit open to second and third year students majoring in either History or French. There were seven questions requiring ticking one option (out of a possible four). In addition, three open-ended questions – relating to reading and to the tutorial experience as a whole – invited longer general comments. Forty students out of a possible sixty responded, and many took the trouble to give detailed opinions and suggestions in the open-ended sections.

One question asked them directly: ‘On average, how often do you complete all of the assigned readings for the week?’. More than half of the respondents claimed to achieve this target only ‘sometimes’ or ‘never’. Reading is also regarded as a low priority of all the assigned tasks for the unit: 70% of respondents listed it as the least of their concerns in a normal week. The question of why many students often lapse in this area is obviously multi-faceted. According to the responses of the survey, the two chief factors were work commitments and the demands of other units.

While lack of preparedness for tutorials is recognised in the teaching and learning literature, it is perhaps an underexplored problem. One suggestion put forward was ‘effective’ reading – essentially the idea of reading ‘less but better’. A welcome insight, this nevertheless tends to ignore the long-term process of discovery that accompanies reading in the Humanities – that reading is an end in itself. Unlike the situation in the sciences, tutors and students in the Humanities cannot resort to a ‘textbook’ for a preliminary overview of the topic of the week, or to absorb instantly certain initial ‘facts’ about it.

Students arriving ill-equipped impacts directly on the essential purpose of a tutorial. As is well-known, tutorials are most effective when students are ‘prepared’, eager to participate and keen to exchange ideas in a friendly, constructive way. What is more, lack of preparation tends to cancel out other strategies designed to increase greater participation by everybody in the tutorial. It is hoped that this report gives a glimpse, at least, into a general understanding of the problem.