Devil's Advocate: How AI Can Resurrect Reading Assignments

Reading comprehension is hard to explain to someone else not just because it usually happens entirely, silently, inside the head; the whirlwind of mental activity often whips up so much dust and debris it takes a few seconds to see clearly, and we just don’t know how it happens.

I sometimes have trouble recognizing my drift from comprehension toward interpretation and thereby position myself to take away my own meaning distinct from the comprehended meaning. Wishfully thinking, I excuse it under the banner of epistemic agency. I think this may have been the consequence of participating in a PhD program—I was finally given permission to take what I wanted and needed and leave the rest.

Take the paragraph you just read. What does it mean, and how did you figure it out? I wrote it with a specific meaning in mind. I’m assuming you understood it the way I meant it.

Did you?

When we assign readings to students, the default is to think comprehension is simple, routine, almost manual work, the kind anyone can do, like digging a trench or painting a building. When we’re not teaching the five-paragraph essay, we reserve real respect for composition, which we treat as skilled, even elite work, done by scholars, judges, journalists, authors.

Don’t think K-12 students aren’t influenced by our hidden curriculum of comprehension. Undergraduates come to college thoroughly trained in the subservient arts of comprehension.

What Veteran Teachers Know About the Effects of Comprehension Tests

Lorraine Cella (2025)¹, one veteran teacher who has taught public school English classrooms and college composition courses, ran a small, informal experiment. She gave high school and first-year college students a nine-item true/false quiz about reading itself.

We learn to read by third grade.

The number we score on standardized tests represents our reading ability.

Smart students are naturally good readers.

Fast readers are generally the best readers.

Learning to write is a process, but learning to read is not a process.

If students reread, they are poor readers.

At this point, I cannot improve my reading.

Since we sit when we read, reading is considered a passive act.

Students cannot control their ability to read.

Students got nearly all of them wrong. They believed low test scores meant they were bad readers. They believed reading, unlike writing, was not a process. They believed rereading signaled failure. They believed comprehension should arrive automatically, the moment eyes meet page. Many believed how they read is beyond their control.

Don’t misunderstand me. This is not a controlled study. We don’t know the Lexile Score or the percentile rank of any of these students and so can’t compare their views in light of their measured capacity. It will not inform a meta-analysis under the auspices of NAEP, and it will never sit beside the NRP (2000) report or show up in RRQ in review of the literature. Cella surveyed her own students, in her own classrooms, without a comparison group.

Treat it as anecdote with a clipboard. But treat it as exactly the kind of research teachers should be doing to inform their practice.

Anecdote earns its keep when it squares with the experiences of other teachers. After decades in elementary, middle, community college, and university classrooms, I have watched helplessly as this exact belief system surfaced again and again. Students describe comprehension as something that either happens or doesn’t — a light switch, a skill set, not a powerful mental capacity on par with composition.

The myths she catalogs are not random confusions. Somewhere, an informal, inexplicit, unsystematic, indirect curriculum taught these students that reading has a correct, retrievable endpoint — a main idea, a summary, a vocabulary list — and that failing to reach it on the first pass means something is broken in the reader, not something is happening in the reader to build upon.

That is phonics logic, the logic that worries me most about the mindset toward reading schools install from kindergarten forward, especially inside the current phonics frenzy. Phonics has a correct endpoint.

A decoded word is either decoded correctly or it isn’t. Comprehension has no equivalent finish line, yet Cella’s students were reasoning as if it did. They had absorbed the ontology of decoding and applied it to meaning-making, where it is necessary but insufficient.

Then, like teachers who experiment in their practice usually do, she reports back to her students that reading is a lifelong, developing, cognitive act, not a mastery skill locked in by third grade. She has them build reading metaphors, read new texts aloud together in real time, and generate multiple interpretations of the same story from different vantage points.

This is picks-and-shovels work being taught as if it were scholarly, judicial work instead. Cella is not proving anything. She is documenting what happens when you tell adolescents the truth about comprehension: that it is interpretive, effortful, and never quite finished. She watched their self-concept as readers change in response.

What Veteran Researchers Know About the Effects of Reading Assignments in College

Cella's classroom sits at one end of a trajectory that recurs across cohorts, not within one. Her students are still forming their beliefs about reading — still young enough to be told, and to half-believe, that comprehension is a light switch rather than a maturing academic capacity. Gorzycki, Desa, Howard, and Allen (2019)² studied a different population entirely, six years earlier, but one occupying the later position on that same developmental arc: undergraduates whose beliefs about reading had already hardened into habit by the time they reached a lecture hall.

Their 2019 study, published in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, carries perhaps more institutional weight than Cella’s. It surveyed undergraduates across 23 classes at a California State University campus, spanning business, biology, philosophy, engineering, history, and education. The sample produced 206 open-ended comments and 262 theme-comment pairings. This is not one teacher’s clipboard. It’s a coded, cross-disciplinary dataset, published in a peer-reviewed journal with far greater reach than English Journal.

The method rests on two instruments. The first is the Independent Assessment of Reading Proficiency, or IARP — a locally developed reading comprehension test, externally validated as comparable to the kind of standardized test seen on the SAT or ACT. The IARP gives the researchers an objective number signifying how well each student actually reads, independent of what that student believes about their own reading.

The second is the Perceptions of Reading Education and Proficiency questionnaire, or PREP, a ten-item survey derived from the existing academic-reading literature, asking students what they believe about the value, practice, and pedagogy of college reading. The PREP captures the subjective side: what students think is true about reading, regardless of whether it is.

Administered together, the IARP and PREP let the researchers speak to something Cella’s quiz couldn’t. They could cross-reference students’ beliefs against roughly measured skill. A student’s self-assessment — “I’m a strong reader” or “I struggle with this material” — could be checked against an actual score, rather than taken on faith.

That cross-reference produced what is to me the study’s most useful finding. Students with higher IARP scores rated their own reading skills favorably. Students with lower IARP scores rated their skills unfavorably. Self-assessment tracked measured ability closely. Students, it turns out, know roughly how well they read. This finding corresponds with student self-placement assessments in use in scaffolded undergraduate writing programs.

What they don’t know — or rather, what they’ve been taught to misunderstand — is what reading is for. The open-ended comments, coded through standard qualitative protocol and checked by two independent raters, surfaced six recurring themes, indicating convergences across the group in terms of what was on their minds in the qualitative data:

• reading is important,

• reading is needed for good grades,

• self-assessed reading skill,

• ideal timing for reading instruction,

• appropriateness of reading load, and

• effectiveness of reading assignments.

Reading between the lines, the data show understandings that reading and grades are linked, that they understand their capacity and don’t need to be told by an assessment office, and that circumstances are less than optimal when it comes to reading assignments in college.

Fifty of fifty-eight comments coded under the theme “effectiveness of reading assignments” agreed that the assignments are ineffective. Students weren’t rejecting reading. They were rejecting the version of reading college had mapped out for them — reading with little direct relevance to classroom use, assigned without follow-through, tested for retrieval rather than taught for understanding.

The IARP confirms these students can read. The PREP confirms they’ve concluded reading doesn’t matter much anyway because nothing in their education asked them to use it as anything other than an input for a grade. Cella shows the myth taking root; Gorzycki et al. shows the tree it grows into.

The Writing on the Wall

Full disclosure: When I worked as the university assessment coordinator at California State University, Sacramento, during a period of angst as the date of the visit from the institutional accrediting body loomed circa 2010, I surveyed university professors and interviewed them by phone to develop an understanding of how they used reading assignments in the work.

They told me, first, that they didn’t believe their students could read well, and they attributed that to a failure of high schools. Emerging from that assumption, they believed that they couldn’t rely on students’ doing the reading; as a result, they couldn’t plan in-class activities which depended on a fulsome understanding of a reading.

They also told me that reading assignments were supplements, not mainstays, and that many students did not purchase the textbook and used copies on reserve in the library when they absolutely had to.

I also interviewed students who corroborated these themes. What was different from the student input, however, was the sense of swimming in the ocean when they viewed reading assignments. Assignments were listed in the syllabus calendar. They were sometimes mentioned in class, often as supplementary reading, and I got the impression that they were floating in a void, obligatory for the syllabus, expendable in practice.

Again, none of this information with the exception of Gorzycki et al. (2019) reaches the standard of top-tier academic scholarship. Instead, it comes from the trenches in the form of recollections and classroom teacher research.

When I learned about the development of the AACU VALUE Rubrics for highly valued undergraduate learning outcomes, I was aghast to discover that there was no rubric for reading among the collection, though there was one for writing.

Susan Albertine, a strong leader from AACU in the trenches who facilitated rubric development, was receptive to my offer to serve on a team to write the VALUE Rubric for Reading, which exists today in real life. Susan and I assembled a team, and we wrote what I think is a useful document.

Enter AI

AI may be the tool that finally closes this gap. If the evidence is right, students aren’t doing the readings anyway — not because they can’t, but because the readings sit outside the actual work of the classroom, floating and expendable. AI changes that calculus.

A student can now bring a dense article into an AI conversation, ask it to discuss a difficult passage, generate discussion questions, or test their own summary against the text before class begins.

Reading stops being a solitary act performed alone without support or expectation against a syllabus deadline and becomes something closer to what Cella’s students needed all along: a conversation, a rereading, a chance to be wrong on the first pass and right on the second.

Instructors could design activities that assume this scaffolding is happening, rather than assuming it isn’t and defaulting to lecture. This is not a replacement for reading. It’s a bridge to it, the kind of support the professors I interviewed in 2010 wished they could offer but had no time to build by hand.

Used well, AI could move reading from the margins of the syllabus back into the center of the room, where Cella’s scuba divers and Gorzycki’s disillusioned undergraduates might finally meet.

1. Cella, Lorraine. “Student Misconceptions of Reading: What It Means to Really Read: Educators need to dispel common reading myths and foster flexible, positive attitudes toward reading as an intellectual engagement, rather than letting students succumb to defeatist mindsets.” English Journal, vol. 114, no. 4, Mar. 2025, pp. 18+. Downloaded from the CSUS Library.

2. Gorzycki, M., Desa, G., Howard, P.J., & Allen, D.D. (2019). “Reading is important, but I don’t read”: Undergraduates’ experiences with academic reading. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(5), 499–508. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1020