Student reading in theory and practice

Oszkar Nagy

Background

Reading lists, together with (i) students’ reading and studying habits and (ii) the implications of both on library resourcing and management, have been emerging themes of Arcadia projects over the life of the Project. The undergraduate supervision system is at the heart of Cambridge’s distinctive institutional competency as a teaching institution, yet there are wide gaps in our knowledge of how it works – if indeed it can even be said to have the purposeful interconnectedness implied by the term ‘system’.

What we do know from several Arcadia projects, however, is that reading lists drive both undergraduate learning and library use. But we are still relatively ignorant about how students actually discover and use books and other resources (as distinct from how they are supposed to discover and use them). Our conjecture is that there is an important social dimension to student use of resources which could be facilitated by smartphone (and perhaps Web) Apps. The problem is that little is currently known about the social dimension of reading and learning, and it would be foolhardy to attempt to specify mobile apps without a better understanding of how Cambridge undergraduates actually tackle the reading lists given to them by their supervisors.

The project

The project will have two main components:

• To ‘embed’ Oszkar Nagy for a limited period (3 – 4 weeks) as an ethnographer in at least two working departmental libraries (ideally at least one in the Humanities and one in the Science/Technology area) with a view to gaining a fine-grained understanding of how students use the resources they are required to access and use.
• To use the knowledge gained in this way to identify, specify and perhaps prototype mobile Apps that would enhance and facilitate the social dimensions of student reading practices.