Reading Trade Books in a Freshman Biology Course

Abstract

Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 report sponsored by National Endowment for Arts, depicts a clear but bleak picture of current status of reading. The survey sampled more than 17,000 adults and covered many demographic areas including age, gender, education, income, religion, race and ethnicity. Some specific findings of study include: the percentage of adult Americans reading literature has dropped dramatically over past 20 years, the decline in reading parallels a decline in total book literary reading is declining among whites, African Americans, and Hispanics, literary reading is declining among all education levels, and the steepest decline in reading is in youngest age groups. Reasons for decline in reading are many, but several sources point to television and rise of Internet use, which is taking away from reading audience. The importance of reading is rarely questioned. Why read? is usually answered by educators as a method to both expand a person's vocabulary and to introduce new ideas (i.e., learn). Reading researchers point to use of words in cognition; development of thoughts and ideas require use of words and thus more words that are available, more thoughts that can be developed. These claims, and many more advocating importance of reading, have been reinforced hundreds of times by studies examining role of reading and early childhood education (e.g., Bowman, Donovan & Burns, 2001; Shonkoff ST Phillips, 2000). Clearly, children who read, and read in large quantities, perform better in school than children who do not. Many college courses have historically been associated with large amounts of reading. For example, many biology courses required students to read trade books such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (Carson, 1962), or James Watson's The Double Helix (Watson, 1980), but now most instructors elect to focus students' reading on course textbooks and study guides. As instructors know, these different kinds of books tell very different stories and elicit different responses from readers. For example, whereas Silent Spring was a bestseller that helped launch environmental movement, textbooks are often little more than massive, and very expensive, compendiums of facts that students seldom read, much less study. This has been documented by Burchfield and Sappington (2000) who found an overall decline in reading compliance in assigned textbook reading over a 16-year span. Despite fact that reading levels are in decline, but merits of reading remain in high regard, we designed and implemented a reading assignment for college freshman science students. The objective of this research project was to evaluate assignment in terms of student opinions and its influence on overall course performance (i.e., course grades). Background This study took place at University of Minnesota within General College (GC), a unit that provides developmental education to a wide array of students, including first-generation college students, students with disabilities, students of color, and non-native speakers of English. GC tries to improve students' academic skills to a point where they can transfer to other colleges within university. Students in this study were enrolled in GC 1135: Human Anatomy and Physiology, a freshman-level class involving both lecture and lab. The course used universal design (Bowe, 2000; Johnson 8z Fox, 2003) as its foundation in that important curricular topics, such as muscle contraction or action potentials, were presented to students in a variety of instructional modes (e.g., lecture, cooperative groups, lab, on-line activities). Instructional methods such as cooperative quizzes (Jensen, Moore 8z Hatch, 2002) and art projects (Jensen, Moore, Hatch 8z Hsu, 2003) have been used in course. In 2000 we decided to implement a reading project in our course that required all students to read a trade book. …