Collaborative Research on the Educational Outcomes of Classical Reading Education : Focused on Diagnosing the Educational Performance of four Korean Universities

The new rise of classical reading education is one of the important features of liberal arts education in recent years. This study aims to diagnose the performance of classical reading education through pre- and post-surveys of students taking classical reading courses at four universities in Korea, and analyze the results to determine what specific outcomes classical reading education can achieve. Based on a total of 339 students who took a classical reading course in the second semester of the 2023 academic year at four universities, two in the Seoul metropolitan area and one each in the Chungcheongbuk-do and Daegu/Gyeongbuk regions, the results showed that classical reading education promotes not only reading comprehension but also communication, creativity, and problem-solving efficacy, despite the characteristics and differences in the course operation of each university. In particular, classical reading education was found to foster contextual reading, the three-dimensional reading of texts, and inferential reading. Through discussions and debates with classmates, reflective writing, and reflection, the classical reading experience allows students to grow and mature by developing a precise and in-depth understanding of the text, as well as through the discovery of new content and meanings that they hadn't noticed before. These experiences, coupled with the results of fostering students' creativity and increasing their problem-solving efficacy, support the benefits of classical reading. Classical reading has also been shown to positively change students' personal and contextual interest in academics. This change in students' willingness and attitude toward academics is very important because it is closely linked to the development of an active learning approach. This study confirms that classical reading education has the effect of broadening and deepening thinking, stimulating and satisfying intellectual curiosity and thirst for knowledge, and renewing students' commitment and attitudes toward their lives and their studies. In particular, the fact that these outcomes were not identified at the level of individual universities, but were common to four universities in different regions, serving students at different levels, and operating in different ways, proves this study to be an objective confirmation of the universal outcomes of classical reading education. A more politicized analysis of the specific factors that drive these outcomes and the search for effective teaching methods is a future task.