A decade ago, when Jenae Cohn entered graduate school, she soon realized her undergraduate strategies for reading scholarly material weren’t working. Her teachers never talked about how to read effectively and simply expected students to figure it out. She felt overwhelmed and alone.
Once she became a college teacher herself, she realized her students faced similar challenges. Moreover, whether or not her students wanted to, they were doing nearly all of their reading on digital devices.
Jenae began to develop techniques that would help students manage the challenges of reading that aligned with their material conditions: If students, struggling to understand complex texts, were doing their course reading on a cell phone, they needed her help.
Combining expertise in writing and rhetoric with leadership in academic technology, she delved into research on ePortfolios, social annotation strategies, historical and cognitive aspects of reading, and effective pedagogy for teaching deep reading in online spaces. This work fed into her book, Skim, Dive, Surface: Teaching Digital Reading, published by the West Virginia University Press in June 2021.
We caught up with Jenae in June 2021 to ask her why we need to pay attention to students’ reading experiences, and how we could help students learn to read deeply, especially when so much of what we read now comes to us in digital form. (Interview posted: June 15, 2021).
PIL: Why is it so important for faculty across disciplines to understand the importance of reading and the challenges it poses for students, especially today? What are the primary misconceptions instructors might have about students’ preparation and needs, and what are the greatest challenges in helping students adjust to college-level expectations of them as readers? As you talk to instructors about reading, how do you overcome their resistance to students reading on digital devices, given that students might prefer to read texts in print but may not have that choice? In short, why is it so important to teach digital reading well?
Jenae: It’s all too easy to forget that reading doesn’t begin and end at basic literacy acquisition. Rather, “reading” refers to a whole range of practices and processes that are at the core of critical thinking and learning. But because we often think of reading simply as the process of decoding language, we’ve come to naturalize the process as something we can all do, perhaps without thinking twice about how our behaviors and practices change when our intentions for reading change.
In particular, reading at the college level can be a real challenge for students from any discipline. When an instructor asks a student to read an article from their discipline, the student may immediately feel rather daunted or overwhelmed by the task because engaging with and interpreting academic articles is a very different kind of reading task than, say, reading a high-school level-textbook, which may be one of the few academic genres they’ve encountered before getting to college. I think a lot of faculty assume that students know how to, for example, take notes and glean important information from readings without recognizing that different kinds of genres require distinctly different reading strategies.
Further still, the task of “reading” should be unpacked a bit. When we ask students to “read,” as instructors, we have to think about what we’re really asking them to do. Are we wanting them to think of responding to a few specific questions as they read? Are we wanting them to find definitions for keywords or terms? Are we wanting them to respond to the text emotionally and offer their opinion or reaction? I could keep going; there are so many different ways of reading (a concept to which I owe David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky some debt given their work in this field for decades).
Once we identify the purposes for reading in the first place, we can then start thinking about students’ lived conditions for accessing and engaging with reading, which brings us to digital reading. I think that some faculty have some “resistance” (as you suggest in the question) to students’ engagement with reading on-screen because it’s not how they’ve practiced reading. Many faculty have a preference for reading on paper themselves and assume that students may also have this preference.
Indeed, lots of data suggests that many students do prefer paper for academic reading tasks, but even if this is their preference, students may not, for whatever reason, have access to paper or the means of getting access to paper. We do know, however, that 99% of college students own smartphones and one Pew Research study has found that low-income students may very well access the vast majority of their academic materials on a phone or a laptop instead of a book.
While a laptop or phone, on their own, are certainly more expensive devices than books are, these devices also have multiple functions, both for their academic lives and beyond. Working students especially may need to access homework or schoolwork on their phones if they’re trying to complete work during, say, a commute or on a break at a job. Therefore, if we want to honor the full range of ways that students may be engaging with reading tasks, we also want to be inclusive and generous in our own thinking about what’s possible for students’ reading lives.
PIL: You’ve developed a framework for digital reading that takes into account “the material constraints and affordances of our reading and writing technology” and offers five key concepts, along with activities for the classroom. Could you say something about how those concepts work, and how you teach them?
Jenae: The digital reading framework I’ve developed specifically names clusters of strategies that readers might use to identify with greater precision what they’re doing when they’re reading on-screen. What the digital reading framework in Skim, Dive, Surface does is connect these reading strategies specifically to how those strategies might get executed when the reading work is done on-screen.
Specifically, the five components of the framework are as follows (and I’m drawing here upon my phrasing in Skim, Dive, Surface, specifically pages 131-134):
- Curation: Readers’ abilities to collect resources, bring them together, and create new knowledge as a result.
- Connection: Readers’ abilities to bridge what they are currently reading with prior knowledge or experiences.
- Creativity: Readers’ abilities to apply an idea from a reading and create something new as a result.
- Contextualization: Readers’ abilities to understand both the text’s literal meaning and why the text was composed in a particular way (this is otherwise referred to as “rhetorical reading”).
- Contemplation: Readers’ abilities to allocate attentional resources appropriately and to articulate a clear vision for why they are reading in the first place.
In terms of usage, I’d encourage instructors to think first about how they ideally want students engaging with a reading task in their class. Then, they might take a look at the framework to see how their reading task might align with a component of the framework. After that, they could consider what kinds of activities might help students achieve the purpose or the goal of the reading they’ve established.
Let’s make this really concrete: In a first-year composition class I’ve taught many times, I typically ask students to read a literacy narrative. I ask them to read a literacy narrative because I want them eventually to write their own literacy narratives as an assignment for the class.
So, what I’ve done to support students reading a literacy narrative in a digital space is to ask them to engage in a connection activity where they have the option to read the literacy narrative in an online PDF reader or an online annotation tool and highlight moments in the narrative that remind them of their own reading and writing experiences. I’ve sometimes had students do this in a social annotation tool where they can share their annotations directly with their peers. Other times, I’ve had students pick one or two of these annotations to share in a discussion forum in a learning management system. Either way, this assignment invites students to make connections within an existing genre to start thinking about their own writing process.
This is just one example; I’ve also had students engage in curation activities, particularly as they’re taking on a research project. So, I’ve asked students to create “digital pinboards” of readings they’ve found online related to their topics and organize those pinboards into topic-based categories.
There are a lot more activity ideas like these in the book to consider!
PIL: In your book, you indicate one of these framework concepts is particularly related to information literacy, but all of them seem important for helping students understand how to approach inquiry and interpretation of texts. Drawing on your OA infographic, do you have any advice for librarians, who typically don’t assign grades and whose interactions with students are focused on finding and evaluating sources? Are there ways librarians could highlight the importance of effective digital reading as part of the research process?
Jenae: Oh, absolutely! Librarians are such key players in this conversation. I think that librarians could absolutely still engage students with digital reading strategies even if they’re not responsible for assessment and grading.
As a starting point, I think librarians are already excellent stewards and curators of resources, so I know that librarians could continue to create resources for students that might make visible some strategies, tools, and resources that students could use to be engaged online readers. This might mean that librarians could author support articles through their library that point students to tools and guides at their disposal.
I also know that librarians often meet with classes in workshops to help students understand the research process, and that can also be an opportunity for librarians to engage students in activities where they not only show students how to find and evaluate a source, but also how to save evidence of their reading about that source (and what they learned from the evaluation).
For example, I could imagine a really excellent library exercise where a librarian compares a search result across a library database, a popular search engine, and within another relevant search tool of the librarian’s choice (perhaps a social network or an industry-specific database depending on the class context). The librarian could then lead the students in a conversation about how the results differ and, from there, how the reading experiences within those databases and search engines may differ.
I think in these kinds of workshops, librarians could also make visible to students the academic skills associated not just with evaluating the source in terms of its metadata, but also engaging in the evaluative process through the content of the article itself (e.g. through in-text citations in the article and following citation trails).
PIL: In Project Information Literacy’s (PIL’s) Passage Studies (the 2012 Workplace study and 2016 Lifelong Learning study), both recent graduates and employers reported that college reading hadn’t necessarily prepared them for the reading they would need to do in their careers. Additionally, students in PIL’s 2018 News study said they struggled to develop strategies to manage the deluge of news coming at them through multiple channels and sort out what to read and share. While a surprising number said they learned about news items from faculty, instruction in reading or evaluating non-academic sources didn’t come up in their courses. Are there ways learning to read digitally can help bridge the gap between reading for school purposes and reading in daily and civic life?
Jenae: This is a really challenging, but important question. First, I think we’d want to consider, from a higher education perspective, what we’re really teaching students when we’re teaching them to read for school (if we are engaging with reading at all). Are the academic reading tasks that we’re asking students to do aligned with non-academic tasks in their purpose? If so, how? If they’re not aligned, how do academic reading tasks diverge from, say, reading the news or reading for pleasure?
I think that instructors could make their class’s reading moves explicit and, in so doing, point out how students’ behaviors may differ when they are, say, encountering a news article on a social network or through a news aggregating application. If a particular academic assignment does, in fact, overlap with non-academic reading behaviors, I think that’s also worth simply pointing out or making connections or comparisons.
Many students tend to binarize academic and non-academic activities (and I don’t think we do students any favors when we refer to anything non-academic as a component of “the real world,” as though academic tasks are somehow part of a separate “fake world”). As instructors and facilitators of learning, we can make transparent where and how certain activities might be relevant to their lives outside of school, especially when it comes to reading that could be useful for students’ careers or personal lives.
It might also behoove instructors to think about what kinds of reading skills they see professionals in their fields cultivating. This may be easier to do in some disciplines than others, but the more that reading tasks can be authentically designed to emulate professional or disciplinary practices, the better. Then, those tasks can be explained or contextualized in light of the meaningful professional or disciplinary reading activity.
PIL: In your book, you bring up a number of ethical questions that instructors need to address with students about how reading is tracked and monetized by corporations. Tools used by educational institutions, such as learning management systems, gather personal data, too. You argue instructors should help students make informed choices and be allowed to opt out of using systems that collect data on them. Yet in PIL’s 2020 Algorithm study, both students and faculty reported they were unaware of the many ways these systems collect personal data. How do you introduce students to the concepts of data privacy, the ways algorithmic tracking of reading can lead to discrimination, and that even some institutional platforms conduct predatory surveillance of students’ reading and learning? How do students respond? How have your faculty colleagues reacted to these issues?
Jenae: Students’ digital literacy gaps are much bigger than I think a lot of instructors realize, which is not really the fault of anyone. Technology changes so rapidly, it can be hard for any consumer to keep up! But knowing that our educational experiences—and, frankly, most of our civic experiences—are now almost ubiquitously available online, I do think that talking about how the Internet works and how information gathering on the Internet works is just part of being a responsible digital citizen.
Educators across universities—whether they’re in formal teaching roles or not—should aim to help students understand how to make mindful decisions when they go online at least to the extent that they can. Unfortunately, many systems that we rely upon in education, like the learning management system, are built to be extractive in terms of tracking student behaviors. Surveillance logic is, disturbingly, rather deeply ingrained in a lot of the ways that we measure student compliance and engagement with academic tasks. That said, helping students know how these systems work can be empowering insofar as the design of these systems will not catch them unaware.
In my own teaching, I’ve started to include a separate unit in my classes specifically committed to explaining what kinds of information students’ browsers collect about them when they search the Web. I typically build this information into a bigger unit about conducting research, and pair the conversation about using the university library resources and network with a conversation about students’ independent browsing and use of popular search engines.
Student reactions to this unit have varied: Some seem completely unbothered by the realities of contemporary data collection practices while others seem rather shocked or perturbed. Regardless of the reactions, I feel better knowing that students are at least aware of the options available to them and can make a choice about how or where they’re consenting to their search behaviors being surveilled.
As for my faculty colleagues, I’d say the reactions are also mixed. Some faculty seem very energized by understanding and empowering students to have greater agency over understanding their browsing behaviors. Other faculty, I’d say, feel overwhelmed or incapable of leading conversations about online data ethics. And then some faculty also don’t seem terribly concerned or don’t see data privacy as an especially great threat to their students or to themselves.
The fact is that digital literacy gaps remain huge in higher education. I think a great challenge of the next decade will be to think about where and how digital literacy education fits in. I think libraries would be one excellent place to have more engagement with conversations about digital literacy and data privacy, though I also think that educational technologists, instructional designers, and yes, faculty are well-poised to have these dialogues too. The point is that the more we keep talking about and sharing resources about data privacy in education, the better off everyone is.
PIL: Bearing those ethical questions in mind, and recognizing the constantly changing and unstable nature of digital platforms, are there tools that you have found particularly valuable in helping students read deeply in a digital world? What should instructors consider when introducing students to them?
Jenae: First, let me just say that I don’t think any one tool is a panacea for supporting digital reading skills. Rather, effective digital reading practice is much more about developing a critical mindset and purpose than it is about using any one piece of software. I think readers are well-served by choosing among a suite of tools to help them move between their different purposes for reading online.
We’ll start relatively frills-free: I think every digital reader needs a solid PDF editor that offers more functionality and customization than default PDF readers on most personal computers. For example, relying upon “Preview” for Mac machines is going to really limit the ways you can interact and engage with the text. Right now, I use Adobe’s free Reader application for my desktop and for my phone. On the desktop, there are a lot of different ways for readers to take notes, highlight, and add text, features that are very basic, but that a lot of readers may simply not know exist. On the phone, the Adobe Reader app allows readers to use something called “Liquid Text,” where they can modify the size and spacing of the text, which can be a really handy tool for practicing contemplation, or mindfulness towards how the appearance of the text may impact how and the extent to which they engage with the reading.
For social annotation, there are two tools that I think are noteworthy in the education space: Hypothes.is and PowerNotes. Hypothes.is allows readers to create private groups and see each other’s highlights and annotations together. I like that Hypothes.is has a low barrier to entry; it’s a browser add-on and so any website or document on the Web can easily be annotated, which is great for students working on a Chromebook (which does not support desktop applications) or on mobile.
PowerNotes is a really unique research aggregation tool. In PowerNotes, when a reader highlights text in a Web browser, they are automatically prompted to label their highlighted component. That label becomes a topic tag, which then populates an outline that readers can share with each other. When readers share their outlines with each other, they can then see each other’s annotations in the original text and also just look at how their independent thoughts on the text were formulated in the outline. So, I think PowerNotes is really great for students trying to make the curation and research process visible.
Cool functionality aside, instructors who want students to use these tools (or others like them) need to think carefully and seriously about a) whether these tools are critical to students’ success, and b) whether these tools are accessible.
Learning new tools is always going to take extra time and cognitive load for students. So, I would think about the chief activities you want your students to engage in when they’re reading and then just select one or two tools from there. After that, I encourage instructors to work with their campus academic technology divisions or centers for teaching and learning to see what kind of technical support on their campus is available for these tools (if any). These offices can also help instructors vet whether tools they’ve selected are accessible for students with disabilities and/or are aligned with the campus’s best practices in cybersecurity.
For those really wanting to explore current tools, Skim, Dive, Surface has an extensive appendix of options, though the risk of writing about particular tools is that they can quickly become obsolete!
To me, what’s more important than using any one specific tool is learning about the particular behaviors and habits of mind that can make readers successful wherever and however they aim to read.
Jenae Cohn writes and speaks about teaching and learning in digital spaces. In addition to several years of teaching experience and designing faculty workshops on using digital resources in teaching in the Program in Writing and Research (PWR), founded by Andrea Lunsford at Stanford University, Jenae developed an interest in strategies for reading and writing online.
She currently serves as the Director of Academic Technology at California State University, Sacramento, where she designs programs and leads initiatives to support teaching and learning for around 30,000 students and 2,000 faculty. She holds a BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from the University of California, Los Angeles, and earned a PhD in English, with an emphasis on writing, rhetoric, and composition from UC Davis.
Check out Jenae’s list of Further Reading Resources and Works Cited.
Learn more about Jenae’s work at www.jenaecohn.net.
Smart Talks are informal conversations with leading thinkers about new media, information-seeking behavior, and the use of technology for teaching and learning in the digital age. The interviews are an occasional series produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL). PIL is an ongoing and national research study about how students find, use, and create information for academic courses and solving information problems in their everyday lives and as lifelong learners. Smart Talk interviews are open access and licensed by Creative Commons.
Suggested citation format: “Jenae Cohn: Meeting the Challenge of Deep Reading in a Digital World” (email interview) by Barbara Fister, Project Information Literacy, Smart Talk Interview, no. 34 (15 June 2021). This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial 3.0 Unported License.