Reading lists - how do you eat yours?

Students at the University of Wolverhampton Business School (UWBS) are given reading lists as part of their guides for each module. Learning Centre Staff at Compton and Telford campuses use the reading lists as the basis for a large proportion of stock purchase decisions. However, there is little or no evidence to suggest how students utilise reading lists when making book selections. Reading lists are a key tool in encouraging students to use library and Learning Centre resources (Smith, 1993). Anecdotal evidence from enquiry desks suggests that students use reading lists to select resources in fairly rigid ways, choosing either the designated key text, or working through the list in a linear fashion. Stubley (2002) states that well-organised reading lists are a key tool to “support, encourage, enthuse and develop students’ understanding and appreciation of a subject”, whereas “less well organised [lists] can be a source of confusion and frustration”. Existing research on reading lists focuses on the operational issues of providing access to them (Smith, 1993), or on the use of reading lists as collection development tools (Stopforth, 1994), rather than examining their use from a student perspective. This research was designed to examine student use of reading lists, concentrating on students within the University of Wolverhampton Business School (UWBS), over levels 1 to 4 on two campuses (Compton and Telford).