At first, being mindful may seem unnatural and even tedious at times. You may wonder, “Why can’t I JUST read without doing all of this extra work?” Here’s why: Research shows that in order to transfer—or apply—what is learned in one course to another, students need to actively think about—or reflect on—what they have learned. In other words, they need to be mindful. If students simply go through the motions and complete assignments and readings without any awareness of them and their uses beyond the present class, students are not likely to draw on those earlier educational experiences when faced with similar experiences later in their academic careers and beyond.

A clear definition of reading in terms of the critical literacy needed for college success and full participation in our society is in order. Reading is variously defined, usually as getting meaning from print. In other words, just being able to pronounce aloud the words that appear on a page is not reading according to this definition. At the very least, readers must get the meaning in order for their activity to qualify as reading. But to be successful in college, and beyond, on paper and screen, students must be able to go well beyond just getting meaning and well beyond just being able to work with printed texts. Reading is a psycholinguistic process, involving the interaction of readers' thinking with the language of the text. It must involve getting meaning, but in addition, it must also entail moving beyond meaning to analysis, synthesis and evaluation. That is, as I and a number of other scholars have proposed, reading must function as part of critical literacy.

...Ask teachers about the problems students have with reading, and they will invariably say that students can't read and don't read. And where does this inability to read complex texts with full understanding come from? It seems clear that there are at least three sources of this problem: lack of instruction, lack of practice, and a mythic view that reading is less important because of computers.

While time and motivation are cited in most studies as reasons that students may not complete their reading, few have explored the reasons why students may not have adequate time for their assigned course reading or why they may not feel motivated to complete it. Further, many studies of undergraduate reading involve research at primarily residential colleges and universities, and do not adequately consider the experiences of commuter students, who make up a large and growing percentage of undergraduates, or institutions with highly diverse, non-traditional student populations... What stands in the way of students completing their course reading, and how can faculty and staff support students’ academic reading practices? Students who do not complete their assigned reading may have difficulty completing their coursework; exploring the reasons that students do not do their reading can inform strategies to support their academic success.

Students learn and remember content in a variety of ways and, as instructors, it is not up to us to dictate the terms for how students retain and transfer understandings that they glean from particular reading assignments. What we can make space for, however, are a variety of avenues through which students can work to apply, reflect upon, and remember what they learn from their readings. By opening up options for reading, storing, and archiving ideas in digital spaces, we move students closer to participating in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) pedagogy, a framework that invites flexible learning environments for our neurodiverse students. It is simply not possible for every pedagogical strategy we take to reach every single learner, but the more options that we can reasonably provide to our students, the more equitable we make our educational practices and the more students we can reach. Helping students understand how they can archive their work is but one way to reach more of them where we are. As we continue to think more about the possibilities of reading in digital spaces, we get even closer to finding more ways that students can become engaged in reading.

When we do collaborative annotations of readings, students enjoy reading each other’s thoughts. Before the technology of collaborative annotation, it was rare that people would read together that closely; it might be possible for one or two to do it together, but not an entire class.