SERENDIPITY: Reading with Purpose (January Blog)

Do you ever read all the way to the bottom of a page and then ask yourself, “What did I just read?”  Or do you find that you routinely miss the point after reading content or literary texts?

A 2004 study by Chooler, Reichle, & Halpern showed that students who are struggling readers often mistakenly believe they are reading when they are actually engaging in “mindless reading.”  This means they are zoning out while staring at the printed page.  Their eyes may be looking at the words, but their mind is far away, and not fully engaged in comprehension.  So how do you tackle this?  You process the text by using cognitive strategies that highly effective readers have been shown to use!

In a 1995 study by Presley and Afflerbach, expert readers were asked to share their strategies by thinking aloud regarding what they are doing as they are reading.  These were typed into scripts or verbal protocols, which were then categorized and analyzed by researchers to provide accurate “snapshots” of the ever-changing mental landscape that expert readers construct during reading.  Researchers now pretty much agree across the board that “reading is constructively responsive—good readers are always changing their processing in response to the text they are reading” (Presley & Afflerbach, 1995).

So…as a result of these protocols, here are the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers.

1. Activating:  Effective readers recall relevant prior knowledge and experiences from long-term memory to extract and construct meaning from the text as they read.
2. Inferring: This is bringing together what is written in the text and what is unwritten in the text and what is already known by the reader in order to extract and construct meaning from the text.
3. Monitoring/Clarifying:  Thinking about how and what one is reading, both during and after the act of reading, for purposes of determining if one is comprehending the text combined with the ability to clarify and fix up any mix-ups.  
4. Questioning:  Engaging in learning dialogues with the text, peers, and teachers through self-questioning, question generation, and question answering.  This may involve marking in your text.
5. Searching-Selecting:  Searching a variety of sources in order to select appropriate information to answer questions, define words and terms, clarify misunderstandings, solve problems, or gather information.  
6. Summarizing: Restating the meaning of text in one’s own words—different words from those used in the original text.
7. Constructing a mental image or graphic organizer for the purpose of extracting and creating meaning from the text.  

At the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, the SQW3R method is taught to aid with reading for understanding to improve comprehension, recall of textual information, and reviewing for exams.

S = Survey Scanning titles and subheadings, summaries or abstracts, introduction and conclusion, visual materials and their captions, the first and last sentences in paragraphs, any provided focus questions.

Q = Question Ask yourself what is this chapter/article about?  What do I already know about this subject?  How does this relate to what I already know?  Devise and write down questions that will guide your reading:  What specific questions would I like to answer?  Are there any focus questions provided by the text?  Can I turn the titles, headings, subheadings into questions?

R1 = Read  First, read without making notes.  Take time to look up difficult words in the reading if necessary.  Use reflection time to

increase your understanding of what you read.  When you finish reading, talk out loud: what was this about?  What questions do I have?  

W = (Read) + Write Now, on your second reading, you will write notes from the text, but write notes in your OWN words.  Read one section at a time.  Try to sum up each section in one sentence.  Underline or highlight the most important points in the text and in your notes.  Refer to the list of questions you wrote earlier and try to answer as many as you can.

R2 = Recall Close the book and cover your notes.  Make notes about what you remember about the main ideas and points of the reading.  Check your accuracy against the notes you made as you read.  Return to the reading.  Read one section at a time and try to recall what you read.  It’s helpful to RECITE ideas aloud to help you hear and remember.

R3 = Review At the end of your study period, check your notes made in recall against your original notes from reading.  Do this again the next day.  Then, read through the questions and try to answer them from memory.  Repeat the next day.  

According to the University, this is the recommended practice to students for not only reading new texts in the course, but also studying the material and preparing for exams.

Now that we have taken the time to visit some strategies to become more effective readers, let’s take about 6 minutes to watch this Ted Talk entitled  How Books Can Open Your Mind by Lisa Bu.  

After you view the Talk, reflect on and respond to the following three questions in your blog post:

1. Which of the seven strategies of effective readers resonates most to you?  In other words, which works well for you in practice OR which one do you want to try?
2. After reading through the SQW3R method, why do you think this is recommended by the University to its students?  What do you think makes it effective?
3. Finally, what about Lisa Bu’s talk stands out or resonates most to you? 

Now that you have completed your January blog, it’s time to get reading!  Whether it is Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus or Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, keep this in mind: Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.  The best way to get optimum results, is to read (or exercise!) effectively.  Let’s learn from the masterful readers!  Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “Some books leave us free and some books make us free.”  How true that is!  Books take you places; they open up both minds and worlds; they can make that which seems impossible possible. But books and texts can only do this if you read with intention and determination. 

It is then that the magic of learning and imagination begins.