Mastering Reading Comprehension: Strategies for College Success
College students often face a deluge of reading material, struggling with focus, motivation, and retention. Active reading strategies, employed before, during, and after engaging with a text, can significantly enhance understanding and recall. These strategies encourage interaction with the material, moving beyond passive reading and promoting deeper cognitive engagement.
Preparing to Read: Setting the Stage for Success
Engaging with a text before diving in is a crucial step often overlooked. Consider the purpose of the reading assignment, aligning your approach with the intended outcome. Are you preparing for a multiple-choice exam requiring attention to detail, or writing an essay that demands grasping main ideas and relationships? Understanding the "why" behind the reading focuses your attention and improves efficiency.
Before previewing the text, determine what you already know about the material to be read. Think about how the reading relates to other course topics, and ask why your professor might have assigned the text. Identify personal experiences or second-hand knowledge that relates to the topic.
Previewing is another essential pre-reading activity. Instead of immediately diving into the text, give it an initial glance, noting headings, diagrams, tables, pictures, bolded words, summaries, and key questions. Consider reading introductions and conclusions to gather main ideas. This provides a roadmap, highlighting key themes and arguments before you delve into the details.
Active Reading Techniques: Engaging with the Text
Keeping your brain active and engaged while you read decreases distractions, mind-wandering, and confusion. The only one who can make sure you’re engaged while reading is you! If you are able to think about what you will eat for dinner or what will happen next on that Netflix show you love, you are no longer paying attention! As soon as you notice your mind drifting, STOP and consider your needs. Do you need a break? Do you need a more active way to engage with the text? Do you need background noise or movement? Do you need to hear the text aloud? What about a change of environment?
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Time Management and Breaks: Effective time management is paramount. Instead of cramming, break down reading assignments into manageable chunks. For example, if you have five days to read twenty pages, read four pages a night. Twenty pages in only one night? Read four pages and then take a fifteen-minute break to rest your mind and move your body. Taking breaks while reading improves focus, motivation, understanding, and retention. Plus, it’s healthier for our bodies! Try using a weekly calendar or the Pomodoro Technique to break up and schedule your time.
Annotation and Summarization: Overusing the highlighter? Put it down and try annotation. After reading small sections of texts (a couple of paragraphs, a page, or a chunk of text separated by a heading or subheading), summarize the main points and two or three key details in your own words. These summaries can serve as the base for your notes while reading. Do you agree that __?
Questioning: Asking questions can help your comprehension. The tactic also works when reading. Ask questions in your notes - who, what, when, where, how - and then look for answers as you continue. Doing this can help you understand what you read.
Active Note-Taking: It's also a way to have an ongoing conversation with yourself as you move through the text and to record what that encounter was like for you. Throw away your highlighter: Highlighting can seem like an active reading strategy, but it can actually distract from the business of learning and dilute your comprehension. Those bright yellow lines you put on a printed page one day can seem strangely cryptic the next, unless you have a method for remembering why they were important to you at another moment in time. Pen or pencil will allow you to do more to a text you have to wrestle with. Mark up the margins of your text with words and phrases: the ideas that occur to you, notes about things that seem important to you, reminders of how issues in a text may connect with class discussion or course themes. This kind of interaction keeps you conscious of the reasons you are reading as well as the purposes your instructor has in mind. Write the questions down (in your margins, at the beginning or end of the reading, in a notebook, or elsewhere.
Decoding unfamiliar terms: Don’t let unfamiliar vocabulary derail you. Look up words in a dictionary before you go any further. It can be hard to recover if you miss the main point because of new words. You may want to bookmark an online dictionary, such as Merriam-Webster, to easily find definitions.
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Connecting to Prior Knowledge: Also view the reading through the lens of your own experience. Look for links and connections between the text and your experiences, thoughts, ideas, and other texts. When readers relate the content to what they already know or think about how it connects to their lives, they can achieve a deeper understanding.
Digital Reading Considerations: Especially if you are taking courses online or studying remotely, some of your course materials may be in a digital format, such as online journal articles or electronic textbooks. Before you read, decide if your reading is something you could and would want to print out. Sometimes it is easier to grasp content when it is on paper.
Post-Reading Strategies: Solidifying Understanding
Reading a text should not end at the end of the chapter. Whether you read a printed text or an online document, the most important thing to assess is how much you understood from your reading. Here are some ways to self-check your reading comprehension. Try “cross-referencing” the information you read with simpler writings on the same subject and discussing your takeaways with peers. If you and your peers vary widely in your takeaways, go back to the text to see if the presentation of evidence can account for these discrepancies. If any information remains unclear, locate other resources related to the topic such as a trusted video source or web-based study guide. Still have questions you can’t answer on your own? Make note of them to ask a professor, TA, or classmate.
Summarization and Retelling: The best way to determine that you’ve really gotten the point is to be able to state it in your own words. Take the information apart, look at its parts, and then, put it back together again in language that is meaningful to you. Outlining the argument of a text is a version of annotating, and can be done quite informally in the margins of the text, unless you prefer the more formal Roman numeral model you may have learned in high school. Outlining enables you to see the skeleton of an argument: the thesis, the first point and evidence (and so on), through the conclusion. What am I being asked to believe or accept? Facts? Opinions? What reasons or evidence does the author supply to convince me?
Teaching Others: Teach what you have learned to someone else! Research clearly shows that teaching is one of the most effective ways to learn.
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Review and Summarize: After you finish reading, summarize the text in your own words. This will help you understand the main ideas and take better notes.
Discuss What You've Read: Describe what you have learned to someone else. Talk to your professor or another classmate. Join discussion groups. This will move the information from short-term to long-term memory.
Additional Active Reading Strategies and Tools
SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review): This is a variation of the 3R’s method of reading. Before reading, quickly preview the text (survey/skim) and develop a few questions to guide your reading (question). Students then annotate the text to identify key ideas and concepts (read). Once they finish, they either write down the main ideas or recite them in their own words (recite).
THIEVES (Title, Headings, Introduction, Every first sentence, Visuals/Vocabulary, End of Text, Summary): This approach to reading treats readings as a checklist and helps students identify them. The acronym THIEVES, stands for: title, headings, introduction, every first sentence, visuals (i.e.
Metacognition: Metacognition can be defined as “thinking about thinking.” Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. Before reading, they might clarify their purpose for reading and preview the text. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text and “fixing” any comprehension problems they have. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read.
Graphic Organizers: Graphic organizers illustrate concepts and relationships between concepts in a text or using diagrams. Graphic organizers are known by different names, such as maps, webs, graphs, charts, frames, or clusters. Regardless of the label, graphic organizers can help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers help students read and understand textbooks and picture books.
The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR): The Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) encourages students to learn how to answer questions better. Students are asked to indicate whether the information they used to answer questions about the text was textually explicit information (information that was directly stated in the text), textually implicit information (information that was implied in the text), or information entirely from the student’s own background knowledge.
Adapting Reading Strategies for Different Contexts
Your college reading assignments will probably be more substantial and more sophisticated than those you are used to from high school. While the strategies described below are (for the sake of clarity) listed sequentially, you typically do most of them simultaneously.
Understanding Text Structure: Understanding common text structures helps readers recognize patterns and see relationships between ideas. Explicit instruction in text structures gives students a framework for organizing information, making it easier to comprehend, and retain, what they read.
Reading Flexibility: Lei and colleagues stress that “Students must learn to adjust their speed and style of reading to their reading objectives and the type of materials to be read… Some reading materials can be scanned, skimmed through, and read lightly, while others must [be] read closely and critically” (pg 40). Students are often shocked when I tell them NOT to read something closely. While I appreciate the default assumption that everything assigned is important and therefore deserves close and critical reading, it’s simply not practical nor is it reflective of how experts in the area read.
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