Embracing Difficulty across the Disciplines: The Difficulty Paper as a Tool for Building Disciplinary Literacy

Abstract

Students face challenging texts and concepts across the disciplines in higher education, and many students lack the reading skills and strategies to make sense of them. The aim of the small study described in this article was to explore the benefits, if any, of the difficulty paper, a written formative assessment that asks students to explore their difficulties with challenging texts. An inductive analysis of student difficulty papers in a multidisciplinary “Great Works” course suggests that the paper encouraged students to address their confusion without dismissing it and helped students to model the processes of good reading. Findings also suggest that the assignment may be a useful tool to develop disciplinary habits of mind. The article concludes with an example of how educators might use the difficulty paper in science and mathematics courses.

The Importance of Making-While-Reading for Undergraduate Readers: An Example of Inductive SoTL

“…I also noticed that in the small but growing SoTL conversation on reading in the humanities, some studies explored how to leverage pre-class assignments to teach discipline-specific reading skills (Manarin 2012;Manarin et al 2015;Salvatori and Donahue 2005;cf. also Chick, Hassel, and Haynie 2009;Cisco 2020;Manarin 2016;Staudinger 2017). 3 I began to wonder how my students perceived the pre-class reading assignments and whether they understood the connection between the assignments and the reading habits in my discipline.…”

The Importance of Making-While-Reading for Undergraduate Readers: An Example of Inductive SoTL

“…I also noticed that in the small but growing SoTL conversation on reading in the humanities, some studies explored how to leverage pre-class assignments to teach discipline-specific reading skills (Manarin 2012;Manarin et al 2015;Salvatori and Donahue 2005;cf. also Chick, Hassel, and Haynie 2009;Cisco 2020;Manarin 2016;Staudinger 2017). 3 I began to wonder how my students perceived the pre-class reading assignments and whether they understood the connection between the assignments and the reading habits in my discipline.…”