The extent to which psychology students read textbooks: a multiple class analysis of reading across the psychology curriculum

Journal of Instructional Psychology, Sept, 2004 by Michael A. Clump, Heather Bauer, Catherine Bradley

Given the fact that students do not give a high level of importance to their textbooks for studying and Burchfield and Sappington's (2000) finding of an overall decrease in reading compliance, we wondered to what extent students read in different psychology courses. Consequently, we used a modified version of the Textbook Reading in This Course survey (The Teaching Professor, 2001) to assess the extent to which students use textbooks in different courses, and we used it as a means to provide instructors with accurate information about how students handle course-related material. The amount students use their textbooks before class lectures, after lectures, and when preparing for exams can affect their performance on examinations, and so it is important to accurately gauge these factors in different psychology courses.

Method

Participants

Four hundred twenty-three undergraduate students at a northwestern university participated in this study. Of those participating, 267 were General Psychology students, 29 were Statistical Methods students, 27 were Advanced Statistical Methods students, 33 were Learning students, 24 were Cognitive Psychology students, 25 were Perception students, and 18 were Physiological Psychology students. Participation in this study was completely voluntary, with students in the General Psychology courses receiving partial course credit, and those in the other courses responding to the survey as one method of obtaining extra credit. Participants ranged in age from 18-years-old to 48-years-old (M = 22.43, SD = 5.47), with 64.6% female and 35.2% male (.2% did not report gender). Modal year in school was freshman (40.1%), followed by seniors (23.9%), sophomore (19.0%), junior (13.1%), and those not indicating (3.8%).

Materials

The 8 questions from the Textbook Reading in this Course (TRTC; The Teaching Professor, 2001), which we altered by including a "I do not read the assigned material" option for the first 6 questions, were combined with 4 questions from Solomon's (1979) study, which had students estimate the percentage of readings they do before class and before an exam both for psychology courses and the other courses in which they are enrolled. The first portion of the survey, which included the 8 questions from the TRTC, had students respond to the following questions: "When do you typically do the assigned reading for this class?", "How much time do you spend on one of the reading assignments?", "What do you do when you read the material?", "What do you see as the relationship between material presented in class and material covered in the book?", "How do you review text material before the exam?", "what can the teacher do to support your effort to learn text material?", "Offer some evaluative commentary on the course text. Is it easy to understand? Is it well organized? How does it hold you attention? Would you recommend its continued use in the course?", and "Overall, how would you rate your text reading skills: exceptional, above average, average, below average, or poor. On what is your assessment based? Do you believe your text reading skills are improving? In what ways?" (The Teaching Professor, 2001, p. 8).