University of Southern California professor Helen Choi had a pretty basic assignment for her students this fall: Read a book.
To be sure, Choi’s pedagogical choice isn’t novel for many faculty; 71 percent of professors use print materials in some capacity in their classroom, a Bay View Analytics survey found.
But Choi teaches Advanced Writing for Engineers, a course focused on teaching STEM students how to write across disciplines. Many of them “think nothing of shoveling a writer’s work into a chatbot for a summary,” Choi said. So this fall, Choi is encouraging students to close their laptops and spend time with Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, about the evolution and tech behind AI.
Choi chronicled her decision in a Substack article titled, “I’m Making My Students Read a Book!” The post caught the attention of some faculty on Bluesky, including Vance Ricks, a Northeastern computer science and philosophy professor. Ricks had similarly selected Empire of AI for his master’s-level students to read this term.
Both Choi and Ricks hope to encourage their students to relearn how to read critically and engage in robust conversations with their peers. And after finishing the books, Choi and Ricks’s students will get the chance to reflect together on the book during a virtual meeting, where they will discuss the role of AI in their lives.
What’s the need: In the past, Choi would assign short online articles for students to inform their writing responses. “The questions I was getting from students indicated to me that the engagement with the underlying materials wasn’t as deep as I wanted,” Choi said. “Sometimes it was just straight up reading comprehension.”
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the average high school senior’s reading scores declined 10 points between 1992 and 2024.
In 2024, only 34 percent of students were considered proficient, which NAEP classifies as connecting key details within and across texts and drawing complex inferences about the author’s purpose, tone or word choice. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders ranked below “basic,” unable to locate and identify relevant details in the text to support literal comprehension.
In addition to helping students apply deeper learning and thinking skills, Choi hopes having print material will allow them to step away from their laptops and connect with peers in a more meaningful way.
In the classroom: Choi and Ricks have assigned the 482-page book to be read over four to five weeks, with students responsible for annotating and reflecting on the assigned sections on a weekly basis. Neither assigns content-based quizzes or reviews, relying on student discussions to reveal participation with the text.
At the start of the term, both Choi and Ricks said they spent time in class discussing why they were requiring a physical book, and specifically Hao’s book.
“You have to justify why you’re doing this abnormal thing,” Choi said.
Students seemed to get it and were excited about the opportunity, both professors said.
“They’re genuinely eager to have those conversations and engage in that sort of reflection,” Ricks said.
The assignment has, however, required some additional attention and time on their part to help students grasp reading.
“I’ve spent more time than I had anticipated literally walking around the book and saying, like, ‘This is an epigraph; why are the quotes here? What’s a prologue? What’s the index?’ Things like that,” Choi said.
Both professors said they’ve had to adjust their expectations for how quickly students would be able to complete the text. The book itself also proved more difficult than anticipated for students who speak English as a second language, so Choi and Ricks are considering ways to better support these students in the future.
The impact: “So far, students have shared that they are enjoying Hao’s book because it is relevant to their fields and lives outside of school,” Choi said. Their written responses to the reflection prompts also show improvement in clarity and organized reasoning.
In Ricks’s class, the print format has proven a fruitful learning experience in and of itself. “Just hearing from students about how they are engaging physically with the book, tactilely, in terms of the smell of the pages or the sound of turning the pages—all of those things, let alone the material that the book is about,” Ricks said.
The two classes will meet over Zoom on Sept. 26 for a student-led discussion on the book’s materials and themes.
While the overall goal is to promote better reading and writing for her students, Choi said the exercise has also been a bright spot in her courses.
“It’s really fun for me to teaching reading as part of writing,” she said. “It’s about the students, but I think having a joyful teaching experience is important for the classroom experience. Every day I’m pretty excited about having this book, and seeing the students with books makes me super happy.”
