They’ve Found It. Can They Read
It? Adding Academic Reading
Strategies to Your IL Toolkit
Margy MacMillan and Stephanie Rosenblatt

What good is teaching students how to find scholarly resources if they can’t read them? Undergraduate students are often ill prepared for the deep reading critical to student success and
required for research assignments. Librarians are uniquely placed to help novice students navigate discipline-expert discourses. The presenters will make the case for integrating reading instruction, particularly those skills needed to decipher scholarly articles, into information literacy
sessions, and provide practical strategies for teaching this critical skillset.

Traditional information literacy (IL) instruction focuses on finding, evaluating, and citing materials but
seldom addresses how students will actually use the
resources they find. Fewer of our incoming students
are prepared for the deep, sustained reading faculty
expect, while more faculty are requiring even lowerdivision students to incorporate scholarly and peerreviewed research into their papers, often without any
formal support for interpreting these materials. This
mismatch frustrates students who cannot read the
resources they are required to use, and faculty who
see students struggling to integrate information effectively into assignments. Students are stymied by
the jargon, structure and purpose of scholarly articles
and manage this problem by reading only as far as
the first “good” quotation, cherry-picking numbers
and other details at random and otherwise misusing
the information—meeting the letter, if not the spirit,
of the professor’s research requirements. The papers
students produce may look scholarly, but don’t always

manifest the depth of understanding and integration
of knowledge envisaged by instructors.
From our work with students, we know they have
difficulties reading academic text, but why should librarians get involved? At a very basic level, helping
students read these resources is key to establishing
their use as part of scholarly work. We spend thousands of dollars on journals and the literature is full of
librarians complaining that students still prefer webpages and Wikipedia. The simple fact is students are
more comfortable with these online resources because
they can read them. As professionals who often navigate the space between novice and expert in the disciplines, librarians are uniquely placed to understand
both where the students are and where they need to
go in order to participate in discipline conversations.
Helping students interpret scholarly sources is a natural extension of our work as librarians. It should be
incorporated into our understanding of information
literacy.

Margy MacMillan is Instruction Librarian, Communications Librarian, Mount Royal University, e-mail: mmacmillan@mtroyal.
ca; Stephanie Rosenblatt is Instruction Librarian, Electronic Resources/Serials Coordinator, Cerritos College, e-mail: srosenblatt@cerritos.edu
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The Problem with Reading
The typical American or Canadian college student is
ill prepared for college-level reading. According to a
2006 American College Testing (ACT) report, Reading Between the Lines, only 51% of students who took
the ACT test, a college entrance exam, were reading at
the college level.1 This is similar to results reported in
the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP) that found that only 38% of American high
school seniors read at or above the proficient level.2 A
similar trend appears in Canada, which doesn’t assess
reading nationally. Almost 60% of students entering a
large Ontario college tested below the college reading/
writing level in 2013.3
One of the problems seems to be that students
aren’t doing enough of their assigned reading.4 Several
authors use National Survey of Student Engagement
(NSSE) data to support their view that students are
not spending enough time reading and preparing for
their classes.5 It’s commonly stated that the students
should spend two to three hours preparing for each
hour of class, meaning the average undergraduate
should spend 24 hours a week studying. In the 2009
NSSE only 27% of college seniors and 24% of college
freshmen surveyed reported spending more than 21
hours a week preparing for their classes which included “studying, reading, writing, doing homework
or lab work, analyzing data, rehearsing, and other academic activities.”6
Why don’t students read? Students describe their
reading assignments as boring, don’t understand the
importance of the assigned reading, find the texts
difficult, lack confidence in their reading abilities,
or lack reading comprehension skills.7 A small study
conducted by Jolliffe and Harl examined the reading
practices of 21 college freshmen who kept detailed
reading logs for two weeks.8 When describing the difference between the reading in high school and college, one student reported, “… what is different is not
the amount of reading, but the level and wording of
the text. The college text jumps to a level of reading
exponentially higher than high school texts, and this
is what causes the struggles for students.”9
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More importantly, students seem unable to make
connections between the texts they read. Jolliffe and
Harl prompted students to make three types of connections with the texts they read: text-to-self, textto-world, and text-to-text. While the students were
able to make all three with prompting, they weren’t
evenly distributed in the journal entries. Students
were more likely to make text-to-self or text-to-world
connections than to make connections between the
texts they were reading. The authors of this paper have
also found this to be the case.10 However, these textto-text connections are the crux of the deep reading
expected by faculty in college-level classes: “[Deep
reading] examines the text itself closely, draws upon
the reader’s experience with and knowledge of other
texts, and engages both the reader’s own perspective
and historical and cultural resources to uncover complex meanings.”11
Many studies have drawn connections between
deep reading and improved learning. Marton’s early
work on reading was an attempt to understand why
certain students were more successful.12 ‘‘Students
who had adopted a deep approach in general understood the text in a qualitatively better way—in greater
detail and in a more integrated and coherent form—
and retained it longer.”13 Reading in a deeper, more
connected way also relates to wider aspects of learning and success.14 Several studies demonstrated that
students who made better connections understood
that text better and tended to have higher GPAs.15
College-level reading is difficult and complex and
in order to succeed, the typical first-year undergraduate needs to synthesize a huge amount of new material quickly. At the beginning of the 21st century the
primary means of communication in higher education remains the written word: Students need to read
and make connections between texts in order to learn.
This process only becomes more difficult when lowerdivision students are asked to add scholarly journal
articles to the mix.
According to the 2014 NSSE, 81% of the first-year
students surveyed were already being asked to use
peer-reviewed sources in their introductory cours-

They’ve Found It. Can They Read It? Adding Academic Reading Strategies to Your IL Toolkit
es. These types of articles have become increasingly
specialized and complex. A 2002 paper comparing
scholarly articles published in the 1970s with those
in the late 1990s found articles in most fields to be
longer and to contain more references.16 There has
also been rapid growth in the number of publications.
A 2003 paper cites the number of active, scholarly/
peer-reviewed journals listed in Ulrich’s International
Periodicals Directory for Summer 2001 as 14,694.17
A recent search of Ullrich’s Web lists 197,960 active
publications with over 73,000 scholarly titles. As four
California university professors state, “We view this
glut of unutilized and even inconsequential literature
as mostly a function of reward systems in universities, research institutes, and funding agencies. Indeed,
scholarly publishing may be more about promoting
scholars than promoting scholarship.”18
These materials are problematic for lower-division undergraduate students. As French describes,
most assignments at this level “…are necessarily
broad, as many classes are broad in scope and are survey courses, rather than focused studies of particular
issues … Asking a student to write a five page paper
on capital punishment is to turn that student loose
into a thicket of information resources in which hundreds of thousands of pages have been written on the
minute aspects within the broader context of capital
punishment.”19 A student at this level wants an overview of her topic, but most scholarly articles won’t
provide one. Those that do will be hidden within the
glut of publications. The student really needs an encyclopedia article or a book on the topic, but the student
doesn’t know this and the professor doesn’t require
these types of sources.
If students are having difficulty understanding and
connecting to texts assigned in their classes—reading that is somewhat mediated and supported by their
instructors—how are they dealing with the complex
reading that they often need to complete on their own?

Why Librarians Should Care
Librarians could simply throw up their hands like
many other faculty and continue to complain about

how students don’t appreciate/use/cite the wealth of
resources we lay before them in IL sessions. Or we can
do something about it. As Rosenblatt notes, “Shouldn’t
we, as instructional librarians, be concerned about students’ abilities to use the information they have discovered?”20 Through our interactions with students
we may be better placed than many to observe the
challenges students face integrating scholarly materials into their academic work. One of the authors was
alerted to the ‘reading problem’ by requests for assistance with secondary source citation. Students were
frequently citing from literature reviews rather than
the discussion or conclusion sections, a behavior also
noted by Emmons et al (2002). The other found in her
research that students were using articles as separate
entities and not synthesizing information across articles. Both of us and likely many readers have had
reference interactions like this:
Student: I need some references for my paper.
Librarian: Ok, what are you writing about?
Student: Oh, I’ve already written the paper. I
just need to find six articles for the
bibliography.
Sound familiar? Both authors have done research
on how students use information, and arrived independently at the conclusion that at least part of the
problem was reading.
Reading is a fundamental but often overlooked
aspect of IL. Neither the ACRL Information Literacy
Competency Standards for Higher Education of 2000,
nor the latest version of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education attribute much
importance to this activity which must occur well
in advance of evaluating “information and its sources critically” (Standard 3)21 or understanding that
“Scholarship Is a Conversation.”22 The first outcome
for Standard 3 in the old ACRL Standards does mention reading, but it has been our observation and
that of others that many students skip this step and
proceed to identifying verbatim material for quotations.

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The new threshold concepts-based Framework
similarly assumes reading under a number of the
knowledge practices outlined in two of the frames,
“Research as Inquiry” and “Scholarship Is a Conversation.”
While reading is not generally explicitly defined
as part of IL, and therefore as part of the librarian’s
responsibility, it is nevertheless assumed within many
of the attributes and practices we aspire to foster in
students. In order to accomplish higher IL goals, we
need to pay attention to the fundamental challenges
students face in reading academic materials. So, on
a purely pragmatic level, yes, teaching reading is our
responsibility.

What Librarians Can Do
Not only is incorporating instruction on reading
scholarly material our responsibility, but librarians, in
many ways, are the people best equipped to do this.
More than most faculty, our work requires us to read
materials in other disciplines, whether it is to understand a new liaison area, develop a class, or assess materials for a collection. We are practiced in reading in
fields that are new to us and likely more comfortable
and accepting of it than others.23 This experience has
given us strategies that we can pass on to students—
novices in their own disciplines—to help them understand new jargon and unfamiliar information structures. We may also feel freer to criticise discourse in
a discipline and to advocate for students against the
incomprehensibility of densely-written articles. As
Simmons states, we are “in a unique position that allows mediation between the non-academic discourse
of entering undergraduates and the specialized discourse of disciplinary faculty.”24
Another aspect that librarians bring to reading is
a deep understanding of the scholarly communication
environment. We understand that academic articles
are not written with first-year students in mind. As
librarians, we are also aware of intermediary resources that can serve as introductions to those scholarly
conversations, resources like subject encyclopedias. A
survey of faculty at Mount Royal University showed
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they rated subject encyclopedias of very low importance across all four years of programs in all disciplines. That same survey demonstrated the high value
faculty place on scholarly articles as resources, even
in first year, and their disappointment with students’
abilities in this regard. Interestingly, almost a third of
faculty expected first year students to learn this critical skill on their own.25
There are two ways librarians can work on the
“reading problem”: explicitly in our IL classes and as
advocates on campus, raising awareness about the issues and pushing the dialogue beyond the “lazy students” trope. We have a role in ensuring that our collections are used effectively, and in exposing the fact
that students face challenges in using them. Of course
the most effective way to advocate for more explicit,
effective instruction in academic reading is to lead
by example. We have posted more detailed strategies
for overcoming the challenges students face on a blog
where you will also find links to research and useful
resources (https://readingstratsacrl2015.wordpress.
com/). The challenges students face fall into three categories: the purpose and value of scholarly articles,
the affective dimension of reading difficult texts, and
technical aspects of article structure, language and
data presentation.
Some of the most important work librarians can do
is to serve as advocates for students by raising awareness about reading at their institutions. When we focus
on issues related to reading during our instruction sessions we aren’t just starting a dialogue with students,
we’re also engaging the discipline faculty members
who bring their students to our sessions. Our unique
position as “expert novices” provides us with the experience, vocabulary, and gravitas needed to speak to
both audiences. Just as we’ve seen that faculty members’ bibliographic requirements play a greater role
than library instruction in determining the types of
sources students use in their research papers,26 the only
way to make a real impact on academic aliteracy is to
begin an open conversation about this problem on our
campuses, while exposing other faculty members to
strategies they can incorporate into their own classes.

They’ve Found It. Can They Read It? Adding Academic Reading Strategies to Your IL Toolkit
We need to continue asking if faculty are satisfied with
how students are incorporating academic resources in
their work, and offer reasons why students may not
be meeting expectations. In demonstrating our value
to our institutions we have to show that our concern
for information literacy does not stop when the student finds the 10 articles mandated by the instructor, but continues to the point where the student has
used those resources effectively, a task that cannot be
accomplished without reading. We also need to start
using authentic assessments that actually measure the
complex processes that make up information literacy.
Correctly-formatted citations don’t provide an accurate measure of the acquisition of information literacy
skills. We can advocate for assessment that demands
students read and use materials well, but this will only
be ethical if there will be support for students to gain
these skills. At the very least we can raise awareness
about the difficulties students face.

Notes

1. American College Testing, Reading Between the Lines: What
the ACT Reveals About College Readiness in Reading. (Iowa
City, Iowa: ACT Inc., 2006), 1.
2. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress
(NAEP), NCES Reading Stats. 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2007,
2009, 2011, and 2013 Reading Assessments, retrieved
November 13, 2013, from the Main NAEP Data Explorer
(http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/). (This
table was prepared November 2013.)
3. Nicholas Dion and Vicky Maldonado, Making the Grade?
Troubling Trends in Postsecondary Student Literacy
(Toronto: Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario,
2013), 18. http://www.heqco.ca/SiteCollectionDocuments/
HEQCO%20Literacy%20ENG.pdf
4. Colin M. Burchfield and John Sappington, “Compliance
with Required Reading Assignments,” Teaching of Psychology 27 no. 1(2000): 58-60; Michael A. Clump, Heather Bauer,
and Catherine Bradley. “The Extent to which Psychology
Students Read Textbooks: A Multiple Class Analysis of
Reading Across the Psychology Curriculum.” Journal of
Instructional Psychology 31 no. 3 (2004): 227-232; David
A. Joliffe and Allison Harl, “Studying the ‘Reading Transition’ from High School to College: What Are Our Students
Reading and Why?” College English 70 no. 6 (2008):599-617;
Simon A. Lei, Kerry A. Bartlett, Suzanne E. Gorney, and
Tamra R. Herschbach, “Resistence to Reading Compliance
Among College Students: Instructors’ Perspectives,” College
Student Journal 44 no. 2 (2010): 219-229.
5. Amit Sharma, Bert Van Hoof, and Barton Pursei, “An

6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

11.

12.

13.
14.

15.

16.

17.
18.

19.

Assessment of Reading Compliance Decisions Among Undergraduate Students,” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching
and Learning 13 no. 4 (2013): 103-123; Joliffe and Harl
“Studying the ‘Reading Transition’ ”; Alice Horning, “Reading, Writing, and Digitizing: A Meta-Analysis of Reading
Research,” Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal
10 no.2 (2010):243-270.
NSSE Report Builder—Public Version (2009-2010), accessed
November 30, 2014, http://bl-educ-cprtest.ads.iu.edu/SAS/
rb_nsse.html.
Lei, et al., “Resistance to Reading Compliance,”; Sharma,
Van Hoof, and Pursei, “An Assessment of Reading Compliance.”
Joliffe and Harl, “Studying the ‘Reading Transition.’ ”
Joliffe and Harl, “Studying the ‘Reading Transition,’ ” 609.
Margy MacMillan, “Student Connections with Academic
Texts: A Phenomenographic Study of Reading,” Teaching in
Higher Education 19 no.8 (2014):943-954. doi:10.1080/135
62517.2014.934345; Stephanie Rosenblatt, “They Can Find
It, But They Don’t Know What to Do with It: Describing
the Use of Scholarly Literature by Undergraduate Students,”
Journal of Information Literacy, 4(2), (2010):50–61. https://
spongebob.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/viewFile/
LLC-V4-I2-2010-1/1506
Sherry Linkon, “The Reader’s Apprentice: Making Critical
Cultural Reading Visible,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to
Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 5
No. 2 (2005): 247-273, p. 250.
Ference Marton,“Some Effects of Content-neutral Instructions on Non-verbatim Learning in a Neutral Setting.” Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research 18 (1): 199–208.
doi:10.1080/0031383740180112
Ibid., 143.
Gregory Schraw and Roger Bruning, “Readers’ Implicit
Models of Reading.” Reading Research Quarterly 31 no.
(1996): 290–305. doi:10.1598/RRQ.31.3.4.; Michele
Dornisch, Rayne A. Sperling, and Jill A. Zeruth. “The
Effects of Levels of Elaboration on Learners’ Strategic Processing of Text.” Instructional Science 39 no.1 (2009): 1–26.
doi:10.1007/s11251-009-9111-z.
Svjetlana Kolić-Vehovec, Igor Bajšanski, and Barbara
Rončević Zubković. “The Role of Reading Strategies in
Scientific Text Comprehension and Academic Achievement
of University Students.” Review of Psychology 18 no.2 (2011):
81–90. http://hrcak.srce.hr/81461.
Glenn Ellison,“Evolving Standards for Academic Publishing : A Q-R Theory.” Journal of Political Economy 110 no. 5
(2002): 994–1034. http://sitesfinal.uclouvain.be/econ/DW/
DOCTORALWS2004/bruno/writing in economics/jpe.pdf.
Michael Mabe, “The Growth and Number of Journals,” Serials 16 no.2 (2003): 191-197.
Stanley W. Trimble, Wayne W. Grody, Bill McKelvey, and
Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, “The Glut of Academic Publishing: The Call for a New Culture,” Academic Questions
23(2010):276-286, doi:10.1007/s12129-010-9179-6, p. 278.
Tiana French, “Scholarly Articles and Community and Junior College Students: An Uneven Match?” Community and
Junior College Libraries 13 no.1 (2005):13–23. doi:10.1300/
J107v13n01, p. 18

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20. Rosenblatt, “They Can Find It,” 60.
21. Association of College & Research Libraries, Information
Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.
(Chicago: American Library Association, 2000), 11.
22. Association of College & Research Libraries, Framework for
Information Literacy for Higher Education, accessed January
2, 2015, http://acrl.ala.org/ilstandards/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Framework-for-IL-for-HE-draft-3.pdf, p.11.
23. Saranne Weller, “New Lecturers’ Accounts of Reading Higher Education Research,” Studies in Continuing
Education, 33 no.1 (2011):93–106. doi:10.1080/015803
7X.2010.516744; Saranne Weller, “Comparing Lecturer and
Student Accounts of Reading in the Humanities,” Arts and
Humanities in Higher Education 9 no.1(2010):87-106; David
A. Green, “Words Fail Us: How Academics View Language
and Ideas in Higher Education Research.” International
Journal for Academic Development 15, no. 1 (2010): 47–59.
doi:10.1080/13601440903529901.
24. Michelle Holschuh Simmons, “Librarians as Disciplinary
Discourse Mediators: Using Genre Theory to Move Toward
Critical Information Literacy,” portal: Libraries and the
Academy 5, no. 3 (2005): 297-311, p.298.
25. Brian Jackson, Margy MacMillan, and Michelle Sinotte.
“Great Expectations: Results from a Faculty Survey of
Students’ Information Literacy Proficiency,” Paper presented
at IATUL Conference Helsinki, Finland. 2-5 June, 2014
Available at http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.
cgi?article=2036&context=iatul
26. Andrew M. Robinson and Karen Schlegel. “Student Bibliographies Improve When Professors Provide Enforceable
Guidelines for Citations.” portal: Libraries and the Academy
4, no.2 (2004): 275-290.

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