Preparing students for class: How to get 80% of students reading the textbook before class

We discuss our implementation of targeted pre-reading assignments with an associated online quiz in two science classes, one physics and one biology. Our goal was to create a pre-class assignment that helped students recognize the benefits of reading before class. Students were asked to take part in a survey about how and why they completed the pre-reading assignments. We found that 80% of students read the textbook on a regular basis, which is much higher than reported in previous studies. Also nearly 3/4 of students reported using productive strategies for completing the reading assignment and cited reading prior to class as being helpful to their learning. Student self-reports were checked against electronic logs and were found to be highly accurate. Moreover, these results were nearly identical between the physics and biology courses.