Research studies on postsecondary education reading and learning show
that most University students today adopt a surface approach to reading and
learning. In general, these studies try to explain this phenomenon by
focusing on students’ attitudes, activities, and skills. The research study
presented in this paper shows that when teachers design an aligned course
that places academic reading at the forefront of the course, where the
selected class activities encourage students to use higher-order cognitive
skills to construct meaning from academic texts, and teachers implement
assessment tools aimed at evaluating whether students use such skills to
read academic texts, the result is that students tend to take a deep approach
to reading and learning.