Information extraction
Most people read the way they were taught, start at the beginning and read to the end, which is great for learning. But as an adult your purpose is not to read the material – it’s to extract and remember the information you need.
Reading is like building a jigsaw you need to prepare your mind with the big picture (the corners and edges) before putting all the details in.
Choose a section to read that will take you about 20 minutes. Write down between one and three questions about the reading material. These could be what you’re curious about or they could be connected to your assignment. The reason the maximum number of questions is three is because most people’s working memory can hold seven things at once, so you have three for the questions and four left to make sense of what you’re reading. To help you choose your questions, think about the following:
What am I going to use the information for?
What do I know already?
What do I need to know about the topic?
What don’t I need to know?
Then choose your maximum of three questions that are relevant to the purpose (not the ones above). For example if I was reading this article, my questions might be: How do I read better? What techniques can I use? Why do they work?
You’ve got your brain into hunt mode with the questions – now you need to empty the jigsaw box and look for those important pieces. The next thing you do is to read the summary. You then look through every part of the document but at high speed – about five seconds per page. To help you focus during this part, you can take your middle three fingers down the page as you hunt. If you’re doing it on a screen then use the ‘page down’ button not ‘scroll’ as it’s easier to read static text. What you’re doing at this speed is not reading – you’re getting an overview of what information is available in the document.
Now you know what’s in the document better, you can check back to your questions. Are they still what you want to ask or do they need changing? If you change them, do the quick scan again.
If the material looked really difficult, don’t carry on to in-depth reading. Leave it until the next reading session. At the next reading session, look at your questions, read the summary and do the five seconds per page again. Leaving it at least 24 hours allows your brain to work on the information, making it easier to read.
To do your in-depth read (the information extraction part), use a pen or your finger under the text to help you concentrate on the information.
Speeding up your reading
Reading is a skill that can be improved just like any other physical skill, so the first thing is to use a pacer when you read. Nothing complicated – just a pen so you can follow the text as you read (just smoothly run it under the text as you read). Then you can start to push yourself with exercises to increase your speed.
Choose something fairly easy to read.
Use the pacer to read for one minute. Remember where you got to. Now read that same material in 50 seconds, then 40 seconds, then 30 seconds.
If you do this every time you start your study session, you’ll be reading about twice as fast in a few weeks.
If you don’t have a timer, just push to go faster each set.
Add a third more and read the original part and the new bit in a minute. Then add a third more and read everything again to this third point in a minute. To really challenge yourself, you can do it a fourth time.
To vary the exercise, read for a minute, then work out how far you got in terms of lines.
Timing your reading
If you work for too long in one go, your attention starts to fall. If your attention is dropping, then so is the amount you can understand and remember. To help keep your focus, short bursts of work of about 20 minutes are ideal.
Have a look at the graph above. The bottom curve is where someone was planning to work for two hours but got disturbed after one hour. Their attention was plummeting. The next curve up shows that if they initially set out to work for an hour, they get better attention. The top curves show what happens if you only work for 20 minutes with three minute rests. Your attention is good, so your memory and understanding will be better too. If possible, the three minute rests should involve walking around. If you have to stay seated, try to do little stretches and look away from the reading material.
Best of luck with your course,
Margaret from Student Hub Live
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