Assigned readings are an integral part of teaching at institutions of higher education. Many college teachers use them as a way to supplement the learning done in class as well as to gain a multitude of other benefits. While it is widely accepted to use readings on a professorial level, students reading compliance does not support said use, indicating between 20 and 40 percent of students comply with assigned readings. As teachers have observed this low reading compliance, they have implemented three common strategies in an attempt to increase student reading compliance.

This dissertation is an attempt to understand the reasons students provide for complying or not with assigned readings. Additionally, through the use of a comparison study, I seek to examine the effectiveness of the three most common reading compliance measures: reading questions, reading quizzes, and reflective free writing. Sixty-three students in a teacher preparation program participated in this study. Through the use of daily records form and an end of the semester survey, students provided data about their reading compliance.

Results revealed multiple themes for why students chose to comply with assigned readings including: reading quizzes, reading quizzes, reflective free writing, time in the semester, page length of reading, whether the reading was online or digital, the ease of reading, how important they felt the reading was to their current course and their future, and the impacts of the teacher on their reading compliance. Additionally, results indicated no significant differences between reading quizzes, reading questions, and reflective free writing when compared. However, both page length and the time during the semester at which the reading was assigned showed significant findings. These findings support three theoretical arenas, first, the substantiation of a reading compliance spectrum including both behaviorism and constructivism, second, support for Rosenblatt’s transactional theory of reading and writing, and finally, implications for pre-, during-, and post-reading strategies.