Most of our attention these days is focused on the many, quickly-shifting variables in the world of education. Even within the ever-changing landscape of hybrid schooling, though, there are some basics that remain constant. This week, we wanted to take a moment to highlight a perennially important (and under-appreciated) skill for any student: active reading.
Reading actively means engaging more of yourself in the process, from drawing abstract connections between texts as you read, to literally drawing characters or plot charts. Activating the reading process improves comprehension and sets students’ analytical wheels into motion from the start. We’ve all had the experience of reading before bed, and finding ourselves at the end of a page not having any idea what we just read; think of that as one end of the spectrum when it comes to your level of engagement, when you’re technically decoding the words to move through the text, but their content hasn’t even reached you.
For academic reading, especially when a text is not inherently interesting to a student, it’s all too easy to fall into this passive pattern, and finish a reading without having absorbed any of the needed information. To avoid this trap, below are some of our classic tips for how students should activate their academic reading.
-Underline or highlight—but with purpose, please! A simple guiding rule is that a student should almost never highlight more than a quarter of the words on the page; given that the goal of highlighting is to help a reader pick out the most important information in a reading, a sea of color will only serve to mask the importance of those details.
-Decode by translating into your own schema! Using different colors for different themes, or picking a separate color for important dates, vocabulary terms, or names will help to prioritize and categorize key details.
-Keep in mind that a good nonfiction paragraph always includes a topic sentence, supporting details, and a concluding sentence. This often makes the task of highlighting “the important stuff” a bit more explicit.
-While highlighting is great, annotation is even better! When students take notes in their own words, it ensures that the brain continuously processes and synthesizes important ideas and details. This rephrasing will help them to check in on whether they actually understand what they are reading, and solidify the information in their memory. Plus, jots will create an easy-to-navigate map of the text whenever students need to return to it to study for an exam or find quotes for a paper, just like those color-coded references.
-Lastly, nothing replaces note-taking. Whether students create a chart of character traits and relationships, a timeline to organize dates, or a diagram to map out the steps of a scientific process, well organized notes are an amazing tool to support processing and retention, while also serving as a study guide for the inevitable test or quiz.