What Actually Makes a Student Want to Do the Reading?

A Student’s View

Student Perspective

A Hypothesis marketer who is also a university student reflects on time, motivation, participation, and why making reading social can change the whole experience.

The Reading Sitting in My Other Tab

I had a reading due for class. I also had work to finish, messages waiting for me, another assignment I hadn’t started, and about six other things competing for my attention. The reading was sitting in another tab. I knew what I was supposed to do: open it, read it carefully, take notes, and show up prepared. I also knew there was a pretty good chance I could show up to class without doing any of that.

My name is Catalina, and for almost three years, I’ve been part of the marketing team at Hypothesis. Alongside my work, I’m also a university student. One of the things I’ve appreciated most about working at Hypothesis is finding a space where I’ve been able to balance my professional life with my studies, while being part of a company whose mission connects so closely to my own experience as a student.

I spend a lot of my working day thinking about student engagement, active reading, and how instructors can create more meaningful learning experiences. Then I close my work laptop, open my university assignments, and suddenly everything I talk about at work becomes a lot more personal.

It’s an interesting position to be in. I get to see education from both sides: as someone helping communicate the value of collaborative learning and as a student experiencing the everyday challenges of keeping up with readings, assignments, deadlines, and everything else that comes with university life.

And after almost three years at Hypothesis, there’s one thought I keep coming back to: I often wonder how different my own learning experience might have been if social annotation had been part of my classes from the beginning.

I Don’t Avoid Reading Because I Don’t Care

I think this is something that’s easy to miss when we talk about why college students don’t complete assigned readings. Sometimes we’re tired. Sometimes we work. Sometimes three professors assign something for the same week. Sometimes the reading is difficult and there is no obvious reason why we’re reading it. And sometimes we know that whether we read 30 pages carefully, skim five pages before class, or never open the PDF at all, the classroom experience will be exactly the same.

That last part matters. When the only instruction is “read pages 40 through 70 before Tuesday,” the reading can feel like something I have to get through before the actual learning starts. But give me something to look for and the experience changes. Ask me to find the argument I disagree with most, identify the sentence that changes how I understand the topic, find something I don’t understand, or connect one passage to what we discussed last week. Now I’m not just trying to reach page 70. I’m reading with a purpose.

There’s another difference between reading for myself and reading for a class: I want to know what everyone else thought. Imagine I reach a paragraph and think, I have absolutely no idea what this means. Normally, I keep going. Maybe I reread it, maybe I decide it isn’t important, or maybe I tell myself I’ll understand it during class. Now imagine seeing that three classmates stopped at exactly the same paragraph. One asks a question, someone else offers an interpretation, and another person disagrees. Suddenly, being confused doesn’t feel like failing to understand the reading. It becomes the beginning of a conversation.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot since joining Hypothesis. I’ve spent years learning about how social annotation works, listening to educators describe their experiences, and seeing examples of how students interact with readings when they’re given the opportunity to do so together. Every so often, I find myself wishing I could bring that same experience into one of my own university classes.

That’s what I find so compelling about social annotation with Hypothesis. The discussion doesn’t have to wait until everyone finishes reading. It can happen inside the reading itself.

Give Me a Reason to Participate

As a student, I can tell the difference between being required to participate and actually wanting to participate. “Post once and reply to two classmates” technically produces participation. So does requiring three annotations by midnight. But a requirement alone doesn’t necessarily create engagement. The best assignments give me a reason to have something to say.

If I know my classmates are going to encounter my interpretation, I think differently about how I explain it. If someone questions my point, I have to reconsider it. If I see an interpretation I completely missed, I might go back to the passage. The reading becomes less about proving I opened the document and more about contributing something to the class.

One of my favorite parts of working at Hypothesis has been discovering how differently educators approach this challenge. Through the stories, webinars, and conversations I’ve been part of, I’ve seen how a simple change in the way an assignment is designed can create more opportunities for students to engage. And because I’m a student myself, I can’t help imagining what those activities would feel like from the other side of the screen.

There’s also another tab I could open: AI. If the goal is simply to know what a 30-page article says, I can get an answer remarkably quickly. I can ask for the main argument, key points, definitions, or an explanation of the paragraph I don’t understand. Sometimes that’s genuinely useful. But there’s an uncomfortable question underneath it: if something else does all the reading and interpreting for me, what exactly am I practicing?

As a student, I don’t think the answer is pretending AI doesn’t exist. But I also don’t want to finish university having become really good at getting answers without getting better at arriving at them myself. Reading is one of the places where that distinction becomes obvious.

Sometimes I Need to Think Before I See Everyone Else’s Answer

There’s a downside to social learning too. Other people’s interpretations can influence mine before I’ve really formed one. AI can do exactly the same thing. If the first thing I do when I don’t understand a passage is ask a chatbot what it means, I’ve already been given a frame for interpreting it. If the first thing I see is ten classmates’ annotations, the same problem can happen in a different way.

That’s why I particularly like the idea behind Paced Social Annotation. Students begin by reading and annotating independently. At a checkpoint determined by the instructor, everyone’s annotations become visible and the collaborative conversation starts.

First, what do I think? Then, what do we think?

There’s something very simple about that sequence, but in an environment where an answer is always one click away, protecting that first moment feels increasingly important.

It’s also the kind of learning experience I wish I’d had more often throughout university. Not because I think every assignment needs to be collaborative, but because I know how valuable it can be to discover that someone else interpreted a passage differently, struggled with the same concept, or noticed something I completely missed.

Maybe the Question Isn’t “How Do We Make Students Read?”

Working in education technology while being a student has changed the way I think about that question. I understand why instructors want students to complete their readings. I also understand what it’s like to be the student staring at an unread PDF after a full day of work, wondering whether there’s enough time or energy left to give it the attention it deserves.

I don’t think students need another system designed to catch us not reading, and I don’t think the goal should be finding increasingly elaborate ways to prove that we completed 30 pages. The better question might be: What would make those 30 pages worth engaging with?

Give me a question worth answering, something worth looking for, and a chance to see that someone else struggled with the same idea. Let me disagree. Let me change my mind. Let what I noticed in the reading actually matter when I get to class.

After almost three years at Hypothesis, I feel fortunate to work somewhere that allows me to connect what I do professionally with something I’m experiencing personally. I’ve learned so much from the educators who use our tools, but being a student has also shaped how I understand the importance of what we’re trying to accomplish.

I know that no single tool can solve every challenge students face. There will always be busy weeks, difficult readings, competing responsibilities, and days when motivation is hard to find. But I do believe the way we design learning experiences can make a difference.

I don’t need another tool telling me to engage. I need a reason to care about what I’m being asked to do.

Sometimes that starts with something as small as knowing that when I open the reading, there are other people on the other side.

Frequently Asked Questions

Reading Doesn’t Have to Happen Before the Learning

Assigned reading can be more than preparation for the “real” activity that happens afterward. It can be where students question something for the first time, encounter another perspective, develop an interpretation, and realize that other people are struggling with the same ideas.

As someone who works in education and is still navigating university life, I think about this often. I’ve seen the potential of social annotation through my work, and I often imagine how it could have shaped my own experience as a student.

The question isn’t only whether students completed the reading. It’s whether we gave them a meaningful reason to enter it in the first place.