I’m Geri Markel. I’m an educational psychologist and my focus is on learning and performance. So in that capacity, I help students with time management, organization, and other study skills. And today’s topic is going to be reading efficiency. And reading efficiency and effectiveness, is something that is frequently not taught as a separate category as students increase in the complexity of the responsibilities that they have. And so if you ask many people when is the last time you had some reading instruction? They say oh sixth or seventh grade. And so we can imagine the kinds of pressures that are put on even extraordinarily bright students, those who are very competent, but who don’t really have the strategies and maybe the attitude to look at effective reading. And so for example this cartoon is talking about blocking everything out except the important parts and goes to the idea that people frequently underline.
But we’ll be talking about that later, but underlining without thinking doesn’t bring good memory and retention. So we want to have strategies that ensure that when a student is finished with an assignment they can understand it, talk about it, and then retain it so they can integrate it later with other information. And so the goals of today are to make students aware and counselors aware of the kind of strategies that do exist to enhance reading, comprehension, and retention, and integration with other sources, maybe multiple sources, and to read, relieve the stress that comes with inadequate reading kinds of things. And it’s very important for students to start looking more deeply of, at the kinds of things that tend to be barriers. And so we’ve included a little self check, which looks at what a student might be experiencing when they’re reading. And so a student or a counselor, advisor, could use a checklist like this and just see if they could identify some of the problems.
For example, some students read rapidly, but they don’t remember. Some students read slowly, but they read so slowly they don’t remember and they get distracted. Some people can read and understand, but not remember. And so we want to really start focusing on the kinds of barriers that exist and the kinds of strengths that students might have. When we talk about attitude and perception, we want to look at reading as information processing so that the words trigger ideas, concepts, help us understand the definitions of terms, and later create a scaffolding so that we can integrate information from different sources.
And frequently, because people have not looked at reading as a set of specific strategies, strategies that they can use to self regulate the kinds of information that they need to read and remember, they don’t really get, get efficient. So one of the myths is that you can read everything at the same rate and in the same way. And as course work becomes more complex, content areas become more differentiated, we need to have a set of strategies that depend on the purpose for which we’re reading. And so we’re looking at reading as a basic building block and vocabulary as a critical variable.
And too often people don’t spend enough time in new fields learning the jargon, learning the nuances perhaps of different vocabulary words and without that basic block of learning, they fail to really comprehend well. This is an idea slide looking at a ladder of learning, which is applied to most parts of learning. And when students look at this in terms of general academic performance, reading, note taking, test taking, it helps to clarify what they need to do for particular situations. For example, these learning objectives are set up so that the lowest level revolves around knowledge, which would be some basic vocabulary, perhaps a map, some calculations, the very basic building blocks of knowledge. At the next level, comprehension, we want students to be able in their own words to be able to explain a term, a topic, a definition, a concept. At the next level, application, the student maybe has to do a problem.
So if you were doing a word problem that would depend on basic reading, basic calculations, understanding the difference between multiplication and division, and then being able to solve a problem. When you look at these three levels, we can look at what is necessary when you’re reading. Do I, am I reading this first time through for some basic definitions and main ideas or am I going more in depth and going to the next level, am I needing to analyze, am I needing to breakdown the components, or the next level synthesize, synthesis if I could say it, synthesis.
Am I required to combine a bunch of topics or concepts so I can do relationships? At the top is the more creative, the evaluative type of thinking in which you might do a critical analysis or create your own design. So when students are looking at assignments, they might want to look at a chart like this and decide, am I reading this perhaps for the first time to get some main ideas and vocabulary? Can once I do that, can I describe things in my own words and then how am I going to apply this to the basic problems and principles that I have to do for assignments or projects? And so the idea that we have different strategies, different rates, depending on what we read, is sometimes a foreign concept for many, many students. So if for example you were reading poetry or trying to get through something you didn’t know anything about, you might slow down because you were looking at particular critical keywords, vocabulary, trying to piece together what the main ideas were. If you’re sort of familiar with something, you might be moving through the material a little bit more quickly. If you were reading a James Bond book or some kind of novel where you knew the characters, understood the style, then you would ratchet it up a little more quickly, perhaps if the book was boring skipping over some boring parts, and then over 350 words a minutes where you’re rapidly locating information.
Your eyes don’t move probably more quickly than 600 words a minute from the old studies that we did in rate of eye movement. And you might be doing that when you’re looking at a glossary, an index, a table of contents, a telephone book, a series of tables, where you really know what you’re looking for and you’re really sort of scanning and you have in your mind an idea of what you’re doing. So looking at this and combining it with the levels of learning, students begin to see how they can modulate what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. Another kind of thing that helps students is to begin analyzing what a text is like. Is this is a text that’s probably just listing terms and it’s really quite scientific or specific? Is it a text that’s describing a con, a concept or a topic, and it has lots of increasingly detailed information? Is it a passage or a chapter that’s doing contrast or pro/con? Is it looking at cause and effect? Is it looking at sequence? Frequently, when you ask students how you read something, they say oh, well I open the book and I start to read.
They don’t do anything to look at what kind of text it is and then adjust the kind of strategy they might use. Sometimes students begin to do this spontaneously, but depending on one’s personality and style you, you might be used to reading everything, learning everything, being able to memorize everything in a book, but not really being able to integrate it.
And at the undergrad level, by the time one gets to their major area or the graduate level, the mass of information that needs to be read has to be handled with a little bit more finesse. Students frequently again spontaneously, but maybe unconsciously because they are so familiar with the language, begin to look for keywords and signal words. One way of making reading more effective is to become increasingly aware of the signal words and be looking at sentences when you read in terms of clauses and where does particular kinds of words come, come in. So if it was perhaps a pro/con and an argument, the student would be looking for words like ‘although’, ‘however’, ‘on the other hand.’ And it doesn’t take much practice for students to begin to look for these kinds of words.
They can practice in newspapers, they can practice in magazines, and they can also practice in the kinds of articles. But this is a separate kind of activity. It’s one where you are trying to analyze what the text and what the writing style is. And this becomes particularly important when students are reading multiple kinds of articles. When you used to have a textbook, you would have a traditional organization. You might have lots of bold headings and separations of chapters or topics. That’s not necessarily true in some of the research articles or literature that students are reading and so they have to have this internal framework or structure upon which to build their comprehension.
One of the tried and true strategies is called the SQ4R method. It’s a method of thinking and processing information, first talked about by Robinson in the ’40s and then embellished upon by Don Smith in the ’50s and ’60s, and it talks about using multiple modalities in going through a reading, passage, textbook, or taking notes, or studying for tests, using the same strategy for multiple uses and emphasizing one or two of the steps depending on what’s going on. So at the first level, you want to survey what it is you’re going to read and what the purpose is for reading. Is it for review? It is for new knowledge? It is for collecting more detailed information? The next reason is that when you’re using different modalities at the simplest level, if you are looking at something one part of your brain is sort of lighting up and active, if you’re writing, another part, and the more activity you have, you seem to reinforce the integration of knowledge and the awareness and the discrimination of various kinds of ideas. And so what we’re looking at is not just a reader who is efficient reading one source, but at the more sophisticated level, a reader who can integrate information from multiple sources and be, do some critical analysis and then application of the information to new kinds of problems.
The steps in the SQ4R are first to survey, to look at a chapter or a book or an article, to see what the components are, perhaps see if you can identify the main idea. The next step would be asking questions. And the kind of questions you ask can be at the grossest level such as who, what, why, where, when, or it can depend on what the assignment is and the focus that lectures have taken. And so frequently a student might have 200 pages to read, the lecture or the PowerPoint notes that are given ahead, only focus on one-third of the chapter. If a student is pressed for time, a slow reader, inefficient reader, hates reading, then they might focus on the aspects that are covered in the text that will be covered in the lecture and just cutdown on the amount.
So surveying and questioning provide an avenue in a way to approach reading. The next step in reading is a very specific, targeted, interactive process, so that you have a question in mind and you are seeking and searching information that answers the question. The next part is that you’re reciting. Perhaps the material is so difficult that when you’re actually reading it you sort of talk it out to yourself as it’s, as if it’s a foreign language, because you’re not really clear about the terms. The next part would be to say it in your own words. If you can’t say it or do the next step, write it in terms of writing keywords or diagrams, if you can’t say it, write it, draw it, you don’t know it, and you’re certainly not going to remember it. So the important part is to really have a step-by-step procedure, which guides you into learning and processing the information so it can be understood and retained and then later applied. And then the next step is a step that’s frequently forgot.
Read it and forget it. I read it. Put it away. But the idea that you’re working in short-term or working memory when you’re actually reading something and perhaps writing it, means that when you put it away after an hour or a day you take out a blank piece of paper and see if you can write the notes from memory. See what you remember and then go back and fill it in. That way you’re not just reading and reading, which tends to be boring and not particularly productive. So if we look in depth at what a survey does, it’s sometimes looked at as a waste of time. I don’t have time! I just got to get into it! I just got to get into it! Well, what happens is you’ve really going over it. You’re really not understanding it. And the survey ensures that you really understand what the whole picture is. A perfect example of this in that, in some, in some courses a student will get an article that describes a study.
Their assignment is to look at how the study was done, the parts of the study. It wasn’t necessarily to understand the concepts of the study and what the study proved. Now if you don’t understand that you might with lack of knowledge about the content be struggling through this to understand what the content was rather than looking at the methodology, the reliability, the validity, and the kind of sampling they used. And so another thing that the survey does is help a student identify the useful reading aids that might be attached to a textbook or a particular resource. And too frequently, especially naïve students, maybe students who are great listeners who didn’t really have to do too much reading to get the good grades, forget to look at these illustrations and pictures and graphs and diagrams. And for many people, especially those who are visual learners and don’t like reading or don’t want to take the time, they can benefit greatly in a survey by knowing what pictures are there, because usually pictures, illustrations, reflect the main points of a chapter or an article. And so just by looking at that, people begin to become much more aware of what the critical aspects of the material is.
Then, we want to arouse our curiosity. We want to look at previous knowledge. We just don’t want to get stuff coming in as a blank slate. The more you question, the more curious, the better your questions are, and are aligned to what you have to learn, the better your reading will be. So even if you take 10 or 15 minutes to survey and 5 minutes to get good questions, you will make up that time by being a more efficient reader. Now where to the questions come from? First, they come from the syllabus. So usually, every class session has a name. Turn that name into a question. The title of an article, turn it into a question.
Any of the bold headings, turn them into questions. Look at the last lecture, turn into questions about how does the last lecture reflect upon the next lecture, so you get some integration. And then again you want to ask what illustrations are there, are any of these provided ahead of time in the, in the PowerPoint. If there’s a problem with somebody raising questions, that’s the perfect kind of thing to talk to at office hours or after class. So we’re always talking about reaching out and going to experts if you just have barriers in reading or you hate books. Oh, don’t give me that it’s, it’s too thick, it’s too wide, the print’s no good. And I think one of the difficulties occurs when you’re talking about surveying and questioning, when the material is on a computer and you’re scrolling up and down, it’s very difficult to keep a focus on the whole thing.
So you’re scrolling up and down, scrolling up and down. Sometimes you can see a couple of pages at once on your computer. Sometimes you can refer to the book, but looking at the big picture prior to reading is critical and many of the things that are on the computer preclude anybody even thinking about looking at the whole thing. Then when you’re reading, one of the critical things that happens is the ability to paraphrase what it is you’re reading. You don’t necessarily do that with every sentence or paragraph. But you, if textbooks are written in a certain way, it’s usually that the main idea opens a paragraph, and the first paragraph or second paragraph of the section contains the most important information with more detailed information.
So if you’re going to read and paraphrase, you might look at the bold heading of a section, turn it into a question, see if there are any critical definitions that you have to look for, and then read the first and second paragraph, and then stop, take a minute, paraphrase what you’re saying. Can I say it? Even using really brief short-term memory am I integrating this, because if I can’t, then I have to go back and say do I understand the definition. Is there a concept that I have to go back to so that I can learn something new? Another key aspect of reading uses visualization. So that old phrase ‘one picture is worth a thousand words’ is really true in this situation. So for many people they’re just using their verbal skills without any visualization or imagery. They’re not using one part of their brain.
So even if you ratchet up just a little bit by evoking a graph, evoking a chart, writing a chart, seeing if you can visualize a sequence, a process, then you are enhancing your memory and your capacity to retain. Reciting is this, is, is making sure that you get it more into your memory bank and using these pictures. The next thing would be to write things down. I’m not talking about reading and being a scribe, because many students feel that if I just write it down I sort of, I learn by writing. I learn by writing. Well, what’s happening is, my silly analogy is that your eyes are seeing some information, goes to your eye, and what happens is that information just dribbles down your neck, [Audience laughing] out your arm, out of the pen, and onto the page, and it never touches that grey matter.
However, if you have an image of it or you say it to yourself and you write after you read and understand, you then can check back to see how accurate you are. So it’s okay to write notes. It’s okay to outline. It’s okay to highlight or underline, but you only do it after you have said it yourself in your own words. If it’s important enough to underline, it’s important enough to say to yourself. Another thing that you do when you write is to write a test question that might reflect the information. So for many students taking multiple choice tests is very difficult. And so if at the end, and we’ll talk about this when we do note taking, if at the end of what you’re reading, if you see things that are alike and only have one subtle difference, you might make up an objective question. If you see a big idea that’s in contrast to another big idea from another lecture, make up a compare and contrast question.
And by doing that on an ongoing basis, you ensure that you’re ready for that application part, you’re not only doing the reading, the knowledge and the comprehension. And the last thing is that review. Now we know that for many, many decades students had been told review your notes. One, they don’t do it. Two, if they do it, it’s right before the test. And three, if they do it, they just read and reread and reread, and by some miracle of osmosis it’s going to be in their brain. If you’re visual and if you’re smart and have a great memory, sometimes that works. However, when it comes to reviewing, the critical thing is to test yourself and learn as you go. So if you’re reading to process information, then you have to stop, see if you can say it out loud, write it, do that diagram again, maybe an hour after, a day after, or at least every single week. So if you’re going to read and learn and understand and retain, and then integrate and apply, it means that you have to do periodic review.
Reviewing notes or reviewing the reading, preferably doing some previewing before a lecture, and then after the lecture seeing if you can read and review the lecture, and then doing it, making test questions and seeing if you can write it from memory. For many students, there’s a need for learning technical vocabulary, and again it’s really advisable to use a multimodal approach. So one of the things you might do is learn one word at a time. Of course, writing it.
But that visualization, humor in trying to memorize it, and then the next thing is taking another technical term and saying what is a term that’s like this but different, because those are the kinds of issues that crop up on tests. Are there words that sort of, are spelled similar, similarly, do they have the same prefix, are they used in a different kind of context.
So it’s not just memorizing a list of words, it’s memorizing words in context. If students were studying for the GRE or learning particular vocabulary in the humanities or other fields, what you want to do is you want to learn one word and then identify a number of synonyms for that word, so you begin to get shades of meaning. And then get two or three words that are antonyms. That way for one word, you’re getting a family of words and a way to become more precise when you’re writing or when you’re reading, you become a lot more sensitive.
And then of course, quizzing yourself. Learning is correct spelling, how boring. Wish we didn’t have to do it. But the more technical and the more complex the vocabulary, the more important the spelling is, and especially in PowerPoint presentations, so many students have to do projects. Sometimes just spell check isn’t enough, as we all know, but often students are rushed, even faculty are rushed, and we get some very embarrassing words that get through the, get through the spell check, but don’t look very good.
And that’s especially true in writing, so when you’re writing tests you want to make sure that at least most of the vocabulary is spelled well. Okay, so how do you manage this reading process? We got some strategies. You want to use SQ4R. [Audience member coughing] What do you actually do to get yourself revved up to be efficient when you are reading? One of the things is not to think that a person is going to read for two or three hours straight some complex test, text. It’s not going to happen. And if it does, it’s for most people it’s usually not efficient. So the critical thing is to set some small goal, maybe you can read for 20 to 40 minutes. Interspersed with, in that time you’re writing, you’re talking, you’re interacting, you’re not just [Slurs words].
You get so tired that you can’t remember. Another thing is to set a strategy. Is this a place where you just have to scan to look at what’s going on, you have to pick up some details? Is this a place where you have to do some deep reading, because you don’t understand the content? Is this where you need main ideas or is this a time where you have to get examples and specific details? And then what are the positive conditions that you need to use or create for yourself? If you are a student who really needs quiet, then you need to go and be in a place that’s quiet.
You might have to have some white noise. If you’re able to study in a room, but it’s too quiet, you might want to put on a fan. For some students, classical music works. If students want to know should I use music, should I have other things on, all you have to do is set up two different conditions. Condition one is what’s thought as the optimal, non-distracting, quiet situation, and then go in a coffee shop where it’s noisy and see which works. For some students, it’s easier to read in a coffee shop if they’re reading humanities. But if they’re doing math or science, they have to be quiet. So as the course work becomes more complex, it’s more important for students to understand what are the conditions that are going to be most helpful. In addition, because we’re so frantic and harried, it’s more important before you start to read to just take a minute to relax. Just spend a few minutes breathing deeply, in, out, get a visual image that’s positive, and then set a small goal. Perhaps you’re a person who is just has do a little warm up, maybe you want to review what you read before just to get you going, okay.
But we can’t think of running and rushing, and then I [Inaudible]. That usually does not contribute. Okay, and then doing the reading you are focused. You’re not answering the phone. You’re not looking at the Internet. You’re not perhaps even eating, okay. You want to be focused. So you want to think of yourself as a sprinter. Ask a question, find the answer, think about it, take two minutes of a break, find another question, okay. Relate, okay. Whatever you know of a strategy that works for athletics or music or dance performance, works for studying. Okay? So even if there’s hours of practice, there’s breaks, there’s mass practice. So it may be that for some portion of time you’re just looking for main ideas, and then you’re looking for evidence for the main ideas, and then you’re looking for some details, and then you’re looking for some examples, and then you’re looking for some comparisons. So when you mass practice this, you begin to get more control. Strategies give you control. Control gives you efficiency. Efficiency gives you lower stress and greater motivation. So you have a nice cycle that goes.
And so taking breaks, not two hour breaks, but five or ten minutes breaks, and the breaks mean you stand, you walk around, you get a healthy drink or snack, you stretch, maybe listen to music, hear something humorous. You want to get your mind in a relaxed state. It doesn’t necessarily mean checking Facebook, looking at the Internet, because you’re still focusing those eyes when you’re doing that, and we want to give your body, your mind, a break. After reading, you have to think. I know this is a foreign concept. But we want reading to reflect thinking. If there is no thinking in reading, there’s no learning. So we want to really be able to sit down and review in our head what we read, why it was important. Can I write a summary in my own words? Can I make up a self-quiz and what is the goal for the next assignment? Many people never really learn to read quickly enough. There’s, although they may be bright and competent, they’re stuck at the word-by-word level.
Sometimes it’s just reading, sometimes it’s fear of missing something, sometimes you always did it that way and it’s fine. And so you may need to have some exercises not with your schoolwork, but to practice reading rapidly with a newspaper or a magazine. And so frequently I ask people to just take the front page of a newspaper, turn the title of the article, the headline into a question, and then just read for a minute to see if they can pick out who, what, why, where, when. Do that with magazines, articles, you can do it with blogs, they’re a little bit more difficult. But wherever the information is really stable, so a newspaper is required to say who, what, why, where, when, and the vocabulary is usually one in which you, you’re aware of and also the concepts are not very difficult.
And in addition, you have some background information. So when you’re reading the newspaper or a magazine, you might be looking at what information don’t I have, what is new that I need to put, put in my memory bank? If you’re asking a question, you can say do I know anything about it? And then read for a minute. So that kind of thing helps just with one minute reading. For 10 or 15 minutes, take a book that you like and that you’re interested in, and read for 10 or 20 minutes and keep a graph of how many pages you read, trying to increase your rate as you understand the author’s style, the character development, the information.
The more familiar you are with the information, the more rapidly you can read it, because you have information in your head. The words just trigger a remembrance of the information or a question that you need to answer. So reading again is interactive and looking for information, processing the information. And also I think it’s very useful and helpful in social interactions just to do some of this with a friend, just meet for 15 minutes, each reading you know one or two paper articles and then summarize them to each other, because frequently when we talk about doing things for one minute or two minutes, it seems so inane that we don’t do it, but really it helps.
And for many people, talking information out with another people is a primary way of learning. So reviewing textbook summaries is critical. We’ve talked about using visualization and so when you’re looking at an image you’re more focused. You can look at one part at time, you know for many science, PowerPoint presentations the visuals are very complex. It might be that the person preparing the plot, slide has studied this for 20 years. And this slide is so laden with information that it has to be looked at in sections.
So for some visual images, it’s necessary to print them out in a large size, perhaps fold them or cut them so you only look at one part at a time, then see if you can make a reproduction of it. Compare, so the real learning comes from looking at things and seeing what you know and you don’t know. The use of visuals really increases retention and memory. If you’re in a test, if you can evoke an image, a flowchart, you can more easily set things down. If you have a blue book, if you have a visual in mind, you can open the blue book, put down what you remember in the forms of a chart or some kind of visual, and then refer to it as you’re writing your essay questions.
Therefore, the visual helps you organize and get more clarity into your answers. So here’s just a few simple visuals that can be used to help you with your reading. So if you know you’re reading something that has a pro/con argument, you can set these up and just do the bullet points and it brings a clarity and a purpose to your readings, so that you feel more comfortable. The cause and effect is caused a fishbone diagram, came from the quality work within the auto industry, because it might be that you had an effect, you assumed there was a certain cause, you went to solve that problem, but it wasn’t the root cause.
So for many students in difficult complex situations, if you can list all the causes for a particular effect, then you can go through the notes and say what, how could I prioritize these, or if I have a cause that’s political, can I then talk about the three options that were political. So these kinds of things allow you to consolidate information and provide a framework that helps you process the information. So in terms of a roadmap to efficient reading, we want to preview and plan, that’s a strategy to get you to be more efficient, more effective, lower stress and increase, increase control. So you want to know what information do I need? What is the assignment? How is the information going to be used? Under what conditions is the information going to be used? It’s really a different thing if you’re moving toward multiple choice, moving toward giving a presentation or a project, or taking an essay test.
So in summarizing to look to improve comprehension, you want to look at interaction, your mind and questioning what you’re reading, understanding the purpose, understanding the depth of information that you need, paraphrasing it in your own words, perhaps writing it out, and then comparing it with the lecture or the reading that you’ve done, and summarizing using charts. One of the things to do is that if you make a chart, then two or three days later you take a blank piece of paper, this is called the blank page exercise. You take a blank piece of paper and you try to recreate it. And it’s such a funny thing. There’s so many blank holes that you’ll find. And that’s where the real learning and retention comes. And I, I saw this with several medical students who made, read and made wonderful charts and bring in the charts say, well I summarized the chapter.
Really? Did you do this from memory? Oh no, I wanted it to be accurate. So there was a chart in the book and they wrote it. Oh, that’s a great idea. Did you then test yourself? Uh, well I didn’t have time. Okay. Here’s a whiteboard or here’s a blank piece of paper, recreate the chart. And it’s very interesting that as you try to recreate it, you are able to put more and more detail in. So what happens is you really are creating information from the core out. You learn the main ideas, get some further explanation, get some details, get some examples. And then to improve retention, again you’re going to summarize, visualize, use charts, talk to other people, write practice questions, and review. So if you’re a student who wants to become more efficient, you could identify one goal and practice that one goal.
It might be that you want to just practice reading faster other kinds of material because it’s too stressful to try and change anything with your course work. I’m just going to read newspapers and magazines. If you need help with, if you think you have a reading problem, you might want to go to Services for Students with Disabilities.
If somebody is looking at your writing and it doesn’t, your writing doesn’t reflect adequate reading and information processing, you might want to go to Sweetland. So there are many places on campus. If you’re very nervous when you read, you seem to be having blockage because of stress or anxiety, depression or whatever, you might then want to go to CAPS. And so you might decide I’m just in one course where I tend to be missing the main idea, I’m going to look at the chapters and use SQ4R and I’m just going to use it to survey and preview and write questions so I’m better ready when the lecture comes. That one step might be your avenue to better reading efficiency.
So that’s it for reading efficiency. I hope this helped you. I have a study tips program. It’s called “A Study Tip A Day Gets You an A”, 365 secrets of study success. It’s a free download. Each study tip is a 140 characters or less. So look under study tips for iPhone, soon to be for Droids too. And the name of my company is Managing Mind located on State Street.
My email is geri@managingyourmind.com, and I’m open for questions or concerns. Thank you very much..
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