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.