Critical reading in higher education: academic goals and social engagement

Critical reading is a foundational skill for success in academic and professional endeavours. By defining critical reading as having two aspects, reading for academic purposes and reading for social engagement, our work opens the door to more intentional teaching of critical reading and its assessment in our students’ work. Instructors within any discipline can cultivate critical reading in their students. Our book, Critical Reading in Higher Education: Academic Goals and Social Engagement (Indiana University Press, 2015), provides not only the results from our cross-course study in foundation General Education courses, but ideas for cultivating critical reading across the curriculum as well as considerations for success in collaborative Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) studies.