ABSTRACT
Learning ....................................................................................... 120 6.6 Whole Game ................................................................................ 122 6.7 Conceptual Change and Situated Learning .................................. 122 6.8 Evaluation .................................................................................... 123 6.9 Categories of Analysis ................................................................. 123 6.10 Discipline-Specific Reading Styles ............................................. 130 6.11 Specific Categories of Analysis: An Example from the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning ........................................ 131 6.12 General Study Strategies .............................................................. 132 6.13 Constructive Alignment ............................................................... 133 6.14 Summary ...................................................................................... 135 Practice Corner ...................................................................................... 136 Keywords .............................................................................................. 138 References ............................................................................................. 139
6.1 INTRODUCTION
Reading is the key to the door that opens academic and professional communities of knowledge. It lets us see how members of these communities organize and express their thoughts. It also helps us understand how they negotiate meanings and construct knowledge. Despite the significant role that reading plays in academic and professional communities, university and college teachers generally take the teaching of reading skills for granted and seldom teach these skills, assuming that all students already learned how to read academic texts either as part of their high school studies or elsewhere at university or college (Erickson, Peters, and Strommer, 2006). Students, in turn, tend to resist those rare instances when teachers do attempt to help them learn to read academic texts, because they believe that they already know how to read. Students ignore that the reading skills that are required to read academic and professional texts greatly differ from the skills that they have been using to read other texts, such as books for pleasure, news, and texts assigned in high school. Consequently, most students employ nonuniversity strategies to read academic texts, which results in students taking a surface approach to reading.
