essay on reading strategies

The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Academic Reading Strategies

Completing reading assignments is one of the biggest challenges in academia. However, are you managing your reading efficiently? Consider this cooking analogy, noting the differences in process:

Taylor’s process was more efficient because his purpose was clear. Establishing why you are reading something will help you decide how to read it, which saves time and improves comprehension. This guide lists some purposes for reading as well as different strategies to try at different stages of the reading process.

Purposes for reading

People read different kinds of text (e.g., scholarly articles, textbooks, reviews) for different reasons. Some purposes for reading might be

to scan for specific information
to skim to get an overview of the text
to relate new content to existing knowledge
to write something (often depends on a prompt)
to critique an argument
to learn something
for general comprehension

Strategies differ from reader to reader. The same reader may use different strategies for different contexts because their purpose for reading changes. Ask yourself “why am I reading?” and “what am I reading?” when deciding which strategies to try.

Before reading

Establish your purpose for reading
Speculate about the author’s purpose for writing
Review what you already know and want to learn about the topic (see the guides below)
Preview the text to get an overview of its structure, looking at headings, figures, tables, glossary, etc.
Predict the contents of the text and pose questions about it. If the authors have provided discussion questions, read them and write them on a note-taking sheet.
Note any discussion questions that have been provided (sometimes at the end of the text)
Sample pre-reading guides – K-W-L guide
Critical reading questionnaire

During reading

Annotate and mark (sparingly) sections of the text to easily recall important or interesting ideas
Check your predictions and find answers to posed questions
Use headings and transition words to identify relationships in the text
Create a vocabulary list of other unfamiliar words to define later
Try to infer unfamiliar words’ meanings by identifying their relationship to the main idea
Connect the text to what you already know about the topic
Take breaks (split the text into segments if necessary)
Sample annotated texts – Journal article · Book chapter excerpt

After reading

Summarize the text in your own words (note what you learned, impressions, and reactions) in an outline, concept map, or matrix (for several texts)
Talk to someone about the author’s ideas to check your comprehension
Identify and reread difficult parts of the text
Define words on your vocabulary list (try a learner’s dictionary ) and practice using them
Sample graphic organizers – Concept map · Literature review matrix

Works consulted

Grabe, W., & Stoller, F. L. (2002). Teaching and researching reading. Harlow: Longman.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout (just click print) and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

If you enjoy using our handouts, we appreciate contributions of acknowledgement.

Improving Student Writing through Reading Strategies

In their MLA Style Center post “Reading Is Not One Thing,” Annie Del Principe and Rachel Ihara make some excellent points about student reading behaviors. They observe that reading a text carefully while marking key passages and making notes in the margins, while once traditional, is no longer required in every class or discipline. The cursory, nonlinear reading that many students do often yields the information they are looking for, especially online. Perhaps this should not surprise us. As Del Principe and Ihara note, experienced academic readers also read selectively to see if a text merits closer attention. (In fact, I skimmed Del Principe and Ihara’s article the first time through!) The authors argue that “[t]hese strategies are not shortcuts or signs of laziness; rather, they are skillful, smart approaches appropriate to our goals and purposes and to the genres we are reading.” I agree in many instances.

Why Deep Reading Is Valuable

That said, what Nicholas Carr characterizes as deep reading is still a valuable skill (97). For one thing, good writing is unlikely without deep reading. Composition courses emphasize documentation (as readers of The MLA Style Center know), but students also learn about essay content and structure from exposure to effective models . Instructors can teach students to notice and analyze authors’ rhetorical moves and to practice applying those techniques in their own writing.

In the classroom, writing instructors may focus on fewer texts so they can spend time helping students read more actively and deeply. In my classes, I demonstrate how I approach an article, a story, or a poem by “thinking aloud” to show the mental connections I make when I read (Schoenbach et al. 101). I read a few lines of the text (a paragraph or less) out loud slowly, verbalizing the thoughts, questions, and associations that come to my mind as I read. After I model the process, students take turns verbalizing their own reading thoughts in pairs or small groups. I also show various ways to annotate or mark the text and, again, give students time to experiment. As the semester progresses, students use these reading strategies and others to connect with assigned texts both in and outside class. Our group discussions are better, and many students seem more engaged as a result.

How Reading and Writing Intersect

In more than twenty years of experience teaching composition and working in a writing center, I have seen many ways that reading intersects with writing:

In all disciplines, reading is an important precursor to writing on a purely informational level. Students must understand a topic before they can write coherently about it. They must do the research before they can write a research paper.
Students who read widely (in any genre) usually have a greater command of vocabulary and the nuances of written expression. Many readers also absorb correct grammar and punctuation subconsciously, whether or not they know the rules behind when to use a comma. The poet Jane Kenyon’s advice to “have good sentences in your ears” is often quoted for a reason (qtd. in Popova) .
This relationship between reading and writing is not a new concept. Reflecting on his writing process, for instance, the popular author Stephen King notes the value of ineffective models as well as inspirational ones. “One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose,” he says. In contrast, “[g]ood writing . . . teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth telling” (211). While fiction writing is less emphasized in academia, the principle holds true.
Finally, college writers need a deeper knowledge of their subject to think—and write—critically about it. Whether it be anthropology, economics, or literature, that knowledge often comes from scholarly articles and books, whether in print or online.

In our digital society, we have become accustomed to easy access to information; however, the metacognitive work of active reading is still necessary for effective writing. Google and YouTube are useful, but there are things they cannot provide.

Using Reading Strategies in the Writing Center

Learning assistance benefits from cross-pollination with reading as well. Some training and practice with reading strategies is a valuable addition to the skills of any tutor, especially in the writing center. Writing tutors focus primarily on the process of developing an essay, but they can also demonstrate and encourage reading strategies on multiple levels:

The text that tutors and students look at together most frequently is the writing prompt assigned by the teacher. Tutors should model how to break the prompt into manageable parts; point out questions, key terms, and other significant features; and help tutees interpret unfamiliar vocabulary.
Tutors can read both writing prompts and student papers aloud and verbalize their thoughts. This gives tutees some “reader response” feedback and often helps them feel more comfortable sharing their own thoughts and questions.
Embedded tutors who work with students in a specific class have even more opportunity to coach students in reading skills because they are familiar with the teacher’s expectations and the assigned texts as well as the required writing.

Ultimately, tutors are ideally situated to support metacognitive development by helping students recognize, evaluate, and adapt the ways they approach both reading and writing in college courses.

Modeling Literacy Expectations

Reading—in all its variety—is a key method of accessing information and understanding concepts in every academic field and in the world at large. Students have limited experience, so college instructors who want their students to engage effectively with the course material must take responsibility for explaining and modeling the literacy expectations of their disciplines. Tutors can help, but teachers need to “make the invisible visible” by showing students the cognitive moves that seem natural to them after years of study and specialization (Schoenbach et al. 23). To quote Del Principe and Ihara again, we must “slow down our instructional pace to make space to model and enact the types of reading we think are valuable and will work best in our classes for our students.” Then we must scaffold assignments that facilitate their learning. This takes time and effort, but the results are worth it for both students and instructors.

Works Cited

Carr, Nicholas. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology , edited by Samuel Cohen, 5th ed., Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2017, pp. 87–97.

Del Principe, Annie, and Rachel Ihara. “Reading Is Not One Thing.” The MLA Style Center , 27 Aug. 2019, style.mla.org/variability-of-reading-practices/.

King, Stephen. “Reading to Write.” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology , edited by Samuel Cohen, 5th ed., Bedford / St. Martin’s, 2017, pp. 210–14.

Popova, Maria. “Poet Jane Kenyon’s Advice on Writing: Some of the Wisest Words to Create and Live By.” Brain Pickings , 15 Sept. 2015, www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/15/jane-kenyon-advice-on-writing/.

Schoenbach, Ruth, et al. Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms . 2nd ed., Jossey Bass, 2012.

Jamil 10 November 2021 AT 01:11 PM

Your article is excellent

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Sophy sophi 16 November 2021 AT 12:11 AM

The work is awesome...what are the reading strategies that one can adopt that can help in writing a term paper?

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Reading is a skill many people take for granted, but the act of reading and properly comprehending a text is a complex and interactive process. It requires several different brain functions to work together and most often requires one to puzzle through multiple layers of context and meaning.

Because reading comprehension is so complicated, we can often find ourselves understanding the most basic interpretation of a text, but missing the emotional core or the "big picture." Or we might just find our brains spinning with no clue at all as to what a text is attempting to convey.

But luckily for everyone who struggles in English classes, on standardized tests, or in daily life, reading comprehension can be improved upon (and it's never too late to start!). In this guide, I explain step-by-step how to improve reading comprehension over time and offer tips for boosting your understanding as you read.

What Is Reading Comprehension?

Reading comprehension is the understanding of what a particular text means and the ideas the author is attempting to convey, both textual and subtextual. In order to read any text, your brain must process not only the literal words of the piece, but also their relationship with one another, the context behind the words, how subtle language and vocabulary usage can impact emotion and meaning behind the text, and how the text comes together as a larger, coherent whole.

For instance, let's look at the first line from Jane Austen's novel, Pride and Prejudice :

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

Now, a completely literal interpretation of the text, just based on word-meaning, would have us believe that 'all rich men want wives.' But the context, word choice, and phrasing of the text actually belie that interpretation. By using the phrases "universally acknowledged" and " must be in want of" (emphasis ours), the text is conveying a subtle sarcasm to the words. Instead of it being an actual truth that 'rich men want wives,' this one sentence instantly tells us that we're reading about a society preoccupied with marriage, while also implying that the opening statement is something people in that society may believe, but that isn't necessarily true.

In just a few short words, Austen conveys several ideas to the reader about one of the main themes of the story, the setting, and what the culture and people are like. And she does so all the while seeming to contradict the literal words of the piece.

Without practice in reading comprehension, nuances like these can become lost. And so it can happen that someone may find themselves reading, but not truly comprehending the full meaning of a text.

As you can see, reading comprehension involves many processes happening in your brain at once, and thus it can be easy for some aspects of a text to get lost in the muddle. But the good news for anyone who struggles is that reading comprehension is a skill just like any other. It must be learned through practice, focus, and diligence, but it absolutely CAN be learned.

Why Reading Comprehension Is Important

Proper reading comprehension can be difficult, so why bother? Even though learning how to properly read and comprehend texts is a complicated process, it is a necessary skill to master, both for work and for pleasure.

You will need to know how to read and interpret all kinds of different texts—both on the basic, literal level and on a more in-depth level—throughout your schooling, in college, and in the working world (as well as in your recreation time!). If we think about "reading" just as a literal or surface understanding of a piece and "reading comprehension" as the complete understanding, a person can only get by in the world on pure "reading" for so long.

Reading comprehension is essential for many significant aspects of daily life, such as:

Reading, understanding, and analyzing literature in your English classes
Reading and understanding texts from your other class subjects, such as history, math, or science
Doing well on both the written and math sections of the SAT (or all five sections of the ACT)
Understanding and engaging with current events presented in written form, such as news reports
Properly understanding and responding to any and all other workplace correspondence, such as essays, reports, memos, and analyses
Simply taking pleasure in written work on your own leisure time

Just like with any goal or skill, we can master reading comprehension one step at a time.

How to Improve Reading Comprehension: 3 Steps

Because reading comprehension is a skill that improves like any other, you can improve your understanding with practice and a game plan.

Dedicate yourself to engaging in a combination of both "guided" and "relaxed" reading practice for at least two to three hours a week. Guided practice will involve structure and focused attention, like learning new vocabulary words and testing yourself on them, while relaxed practice will involve merely letting yourself read and enjoy reading without pressure for at least one to two hours a week. (Note: if you already read for pleasure, add at least one more hour of pleasure-reading per week.)

By combining reading-for-studying and reading-for-pleasure, you'll be able to improve your reading skill without relegating reading time to the realm of "work" alone. Reading is a huge part of our daily lives, and improving your comprehension should never come at the cost of depriving yourself of the pleasure of the activity.

So what are some of the first steps for improving your reading comprehension level?

Step 1: Understand and Reevaluate How You're Currently Reading

Before you can improve your reading comprehension, you must first understand how you're currently reading and what your limitations are.

Start by selecting excerpts from different texts with which you are unfamiliar—text books, essays, novels, news reports, or any kind of text you feel you particularly struggle to understand—and read them as you would normally. As you read, see if you can notice when your attention, energy, or comprehension of the material begins to flag.

If your comprehension or concentration tends to lag after a period of time, start to slowly build up your stamina. For instance, if you continually lose focus at the 20 minute mark every time you read, acknowledge this and push yourself to slowly increase that time, rather than trying to sit and concentrate on reading for an hour or two at a stretch. Begin by reading for your maximum amount of focused time (in this case, twenty minutes), then give yourself a break. Next time, try for 22 minutes. Once you've mastered that, try for 25 and see if you can still maintain focus. If you can, then try for thirty.

If you find that your concentration or comprehension starts to lag again , take a step back on your timing before pushing yourself for more. Improvement comes with time, and it'll only cause frustration if you try to rush it all at once.

Alternatively, you may find that your issues with reading comprehension have less to do with the time spent reading than with the source material itself. Perhaps you struggle to comprehend the essential elements of a text, the context of a piece, character arcs or motivation, books or textbooks with densely packed information, or material that is heavily symbolic. If this is the case, then be sure to follow the tips below to improve these areas of reading comprehension weakness.

Improving your reading comprehension level takes time and practice, but understanding where your strengths and weaknesses stand now is the first step towards progress.

Step 2: Improve Your Vocabulary

Reading and comprehension rely on a combination of vocabulary, context, and the interaction of words. So you must be able to understand each moving piece before you can understand the text as a whole.

If you struggle to understand specific vocabulary, it's sometimes possible to pick up meaning through context clues (how the words are used in the sentence or in the passage), but it's always a good idea to look up the definitions of words with which you aren't familiar. As you read, make sure to keep a running list of words you don't readily recognize and make yourself a set of flashcards with the words and their definitions. Dedicate fifteen minutes two or three times a week to and quizzing yourself on your vocab flashcards.

To get started, you'll need some blank index cards and a system to keep them organized. These basic cards are an affordable option that are also available in fun colors . You can keep them organized with plastic baggies or rubber bands, or you can get an organizer .

Alternatively, try these easy-flip flashcards that include binder clips. Though we strongly recommend making your own flashcards, you can also buy pre-made ones —the best option is Barron's 1100 Words You Need to Know , a series of exercises to master key words and idioms.

In order to retain your vocabulary knowledge, you must employ a combination of practiced memorization (like studying your flashcards) and make a point of using these new words in your verbal and written communication. Guided vocabulary practice like this will give you access to new words and their meanings as well as allow you to properly retain them.

Step 3: Read for Pleasure

The best way to improve your reading comprehension level is through practice. And the best way to practice is to have fun with it!

Make reading a fun activity, at least on occasion, rather than a constant chore. This will motivate you to engage with the text and embrace the activity as part of your daily life (rather than just your study/work life). As you practice and truly engage with your reading material, improvement will come naturally.

Begin by reading texts that are slightly below your age and grade level (especially if reading is frustrating or difficult for you). This will take pressure off of you and allow you to relax and enjoy the story. Here are some fun, easy reads that we recommend to get you started:

Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roksani Chokshi
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
Ghost by Jason Reynolds
The Westing Game by Ellen Rankin
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson
I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K .Rowling

Once you feel more comfortable reading and practicing your comprehension strategies (tips in the next section), go ahead and allow yourself to read at whatever reading or age level you feel like. Even if you feel that you don't understand some of the text right now—or even a large portion of it!—if you enjoy yourself and give it your best shot, you'll find that your reading comprehension levels will improve over time.

Reading these problematic passages aloud can often help circumvent that block and help you to form a visual of what the text is trying to convey.

Tip 3: Re-read (or Skim) Previous Sections of the Text

For the most part, reading is a personal activity that happens entirely in your head. So don't feel you have to read just like anyone else if "typical" methods don't work for you. Sometimes it can make the most sense to read (or re-read) a text out of order.

It is often helpful to glance backwards through a piece of text (or even re-read large sections) to remind yourself of any information you need and have forgotten—what happened previously, what a particular word means, who a person was...the list is endless.

Previous sentences, sections, or even whole chapters can provide helpful context clues. Re-reading these passages will help to refresh your memory so that you can better understand and interpret later sections of the text.

Tip 4: Skim or Read Upcoming Sections of the Text

Just like with the previous step, don't feel that the only way to read and understand a text is to work through it completely linearly. Allow yourself the freedom to take apart the text and put it back together again in whichever way makes the most sense to you.

Sometimes a current confusion in a work will be explained later on in the text, and it can help you to know that explanations are upcoming or even just to read them ahead of time.

So skip forward or backwards, re-read or read ahead as you need to, take the piece in whatever order you need to in order to make sense of the text. Not everyone thinks linearly, and not everyone best understands texts linearly either.

Tip 5: Discuss the Text With a Friend (Even an Imaginary Friend)

Sometimes discussing what you know so far about a text can help clear up any confusion. If you have a friend who hasn't read the text in question, then explain it to them in your own words, and discuss where you feel your comprehension is lacking. You'll find that you've probably understood more than you think once you've been forced to explain it to someone who's completely unfamiliar with the piece.

Even if no one else is in the room, trying to teach or discuss what a passage says or means with "someone else" can be extremely beneficial. In fact, software engineers call this technique "rubber duck debugging," wherein they explain a coding problem to a rubber duck. This forces them to work through a problem aloud, which has proven time and time again to help people solve problems. So if a piece of text has your head spinning from trying to work through it by yourself, start chatting with your nearest friend/pet/rubber duck. You'll be surprised with how much easier it is to understand a text once you've talked it through with someone.

Even if that someone is a duck.

The Take-Aways

Improving reading comprehension takes time and effort, but it can be done. Be patient with yourself, work through your reading comprehension steps, and try not to get frustrated with yourself if you feel your progress is slow or if you feel you're "falling behind." You will utilize your reading skills throughout your life, so go at a pace that works for you, and take care to maintain that balance between reading for pure pleasure and reading for dedicated improvement.

As you begin to incorporate more and more reading into your daily life, you'll find that comprehension will become easier, and reading will become more fun. In every piece of text, there are worlds of meaning to explore, and learning how to uncover them can be the ultimate rewarding journey.

What's Next?

Can't get enough reading? Whether as part of your reading practice or just for fun, check out our picks for the 31 best books to read in high school.

Problems with procrastination? Whether you're studying for the SAT's or studying your reading comprehension vocabulary check out how to beat procrastination and get your studies back on track.

Want to earn better grades? Our guide will help you get that 4.0 you're striving for .

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links PrepScholar may receive a commission.

Courtney scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT in high school and went on to graduate from Stanford University with a degree in Cultural and Social Anthropology. She is passionate about bringing education and the tools to succeed to students from all backgrounds and walks of life, as she believes open education is one of the great societal equalizers. She has years of tutoring experience and writes creative works in her free time.

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Active Reading Strategies

Active reading.

Now that you have acquainted (or reacquainted) yourself with useful planning and comprehension strategies, college reading assignments may feel more manageable. You know what you need to do to get your reading done and make sure you grasp the main points. However, the most successful students in college are not only competent readers but active, engaged readers.

Using the SQ3R Strategy

One strategy you can use to become a more active, engaged reader is the SQ3R strategy, a step-by-step process to follow before, during, and after reading. You may already use some variation of it. In essence, the process works like this:

Survey the text in advance.
Form questions before you start reading.
Read the text.
Recite and/or record important points during and after reading.
Review and reflect on the text after you read.

Before you read, you survey, or preview, the text. As noted earlier, reading introductory paragraphs and headings can help you begin to figure out the author’s main point and identify what important topics will be covered. However, surveying does not stop there. Look over sidebars, photographs, and any other text or graphic features that catch your eye. Skim a few paragraphs. Preview any boldfaced or italicized vocabulary terms. This will help you form a first impression of the material.

Next, start brainstorming questions about the text. What do you expect to learn from the reading? You may find that some questions come to mind immediately based on your initial survey or based on previous readings and class discussions. If not, try using headings and subheadings in the text to formulate questions. For instance, if one heading in your textbook reads “Medicare and Medicaid,” you might ask yourself these questions:

When was Medicare and Medicaid legislation enacted? Why?
What are the major differences between these two programs?

Although some of your questions may be simple factual questions, try to come up with a few that are more open-ended. Asking in-depth questions will help you stay more engaged as you read.

The next step is simple: read. As you read, notice whether your first impressions of the text were correct. Are the author’s main points and overall approach about the same as what you predicted—or does the text contain a few surprises? Also, look for answers to your earlier questions and begin forming new questions. Continue to revise your impressions and questions as you read.

While you are reading, pause occasionally to recite or record important points. It is best to do this at the end of each section or when there is an obvious shift in the writer’s train of thought. Put the book aside for a moment and recite aloud the main points of the section or any important answers you found there. You might also record ideas by jotting down a few brief notes in addition to, or instead of, reciting aloud. Either way, the physical act of articulating information makes you more likely to remember it.

After you have completed the reading, take some time to review the material more thoroughly. If the textbook includes review questions or your instructor has provided a study guide, use these tools to guide your review. You will want to record information in a more detailed format than you used during reading, such as in an outline or a list.

As you review the material, reflect on what you learned. Did anything surprise you, upset you, or make you think? Did you find yourself strongly agreeing or disagreeing with any points in the text? What topics would you like to explore further? Jot down your reflections in your notes. (Instructors sometimes require students to write brief response papers or maintain a reading journal. Use these assignments to help you reflect on what you read.)

Choose another text that that you have been assigned to read for a class. Use the SQ3R process to complete the reading. (Keep in mind that you may need to spread the reading over more than one session, especially if the text is long.)

Be sure to complete all the steps involved. Then, reflect on how helpful you found this process. On a scale of one to ten, how useful did you find it? How does it compare with other study techniques you have used?

Using Other Active Reading Strategies

The SQ3R process encompasses a number of valuable active reading strategies: previewing a text, making predictions, asking and answering questions, and summarizing. You can use the following additional strategies to further deepen your understanding of what you read.

Connect what you read to what you already know. Look for ways the reading supports, extends, or challenges concepts you have learned elsewhere.
Relate the reading to your own life. What statements, people, or situations relate to your personal experiences?
Visualize. For both fiction and nonfiction texts, try to picture what is described. Visualizing is especially helpful when you are reading a narrative text, such as a novel or a historical account, or when you read expository text that describes a process, such as how to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
Pay attention to graphics as well as text. Photographs, diagrams, flow charts, tables, and other graphics can help make abstract ideas more concrete and understandable.
Understand the text in context. Understanding context means thinking about who wrote the text, when and where it was written, the author’s purpose for writing it, and what assumptions or agendas influenced the author’s ideas. For instance, two writers might both address the subject of health care reform, but if one article is an opinion piece and one is a news story, the context is different.
Plan to talk or write about what you read. Jot down a few questions or comments in your notebook so you can bring them up in class. (This also gives you a source of topic ideas for papers and presentations later in the semester.) Discuss the reading on a class discussion board or blog about it.

Writing at Work

Many college courses require students to participate in interactive online components, such as a discussion forum, a page on a social networking site, or a class blog. These tools are a great way to reinforce learning. Do not be afraid to be the student who starts the discussion.

Remember that when you interact with other students and teachers online, you need to project a mature, professional image. You may be able to use an informal, conversational tone, but complaining about the work load, using off-color language, or criticizing other participants is inappropriate.

Active reading can benefit you in ways that go beyond just earning good grades. By practicing these strategies, you will find yourself more interested in your courses and better able to relate your academic work to the rest of your life. Being an interested, engaged student also helps you form lasting connections with your instructors and with other students that can be personally and professionally valuable. In short, it helps you get the most out of your education.

The Writing Textbook Copyright © 2021 by Josh Woods, editor and contributor, as well as an unnamed author (by request from the original publisher), and other authors named separately is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers

To improve students’ reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one.

To assume that one can simply have students memorize and routinely execute a set of strategies is to misconceive the nature of strategic processing or executive control. Such rote applications of these procedures represents, in essence, a true oxymoron-non-strategic strategic processing. — Alexander and Murphy (1998, p. 33)

If the struggling readers in your content classroom routinely miss the point when “reading” content text, consider teaching them one or more of the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers. Cognitive strategies are the mental processes used by skilled readers to extract and construct meaning from text and to create knowledge structures in long-term memory. When these strategies are directly taught to and modeled for struggling readers, their comprehension and retention improve.

Struggling students often mistakenly believe they are reading when they are actually engaged in what researchers call mindless reading (Schooler, Reichle, & Halpern, 2004), zoning out while staring at the printed page. The opposite of mindless reading is the processing of text by highly effective readers using cognitive strategies. These strategies are described in a fascinating qualitative study that asked expert readers to think aloud regarding what was happening in their minds while they were reading. The lengthy scripts recording these spoken thoughts (i.e., think-alouds) are called verbal protocols (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995). These protocols were categorized and analyzed by researchers to answer specific questions, such as, What is the influence of prior knowledge on expert readers’ strategies as they determine the main idea of a text? (Afflerbach, 1990b).

The protocols provide accurate “snapshots” and even “videos” of the ever-changing mental landscape that expert readers construct during reading. Researchers have concluded that reading is “constructively responsive-that is, good readers are always changing their processing in response to the text they are reading” (Pressley & Afflerbach, 1995, p. 2). Instructional Aid 1.1 defines the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers, and Instructional Aid 1.2 provides a lesson plan template for teaching a cognitive strategy.

Instructional aids

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McEwan, 2004. 7 Strategies of Highly Effective Readers: Using Cognitive Research to Boost K-8 Achievement. Wood, Woloshyn, & Willoughby, 1995. Cognitive Strategy Instruction for Middle and High Schools.

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11 Karen Rosenberg’s “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources”

Writing Spaces Volume 2

Engaging with academic texts can be challenging especially when the intended audience is other academics and not readers who are new to a topic or conversation. While being an outsider to an academic topic can be difficult, Karen Rosenberg describes their own experience with reading difficult texts and how we can approach the process practically. Even if we don’t fully understand everything we read in an unfamiliar topic, by employing a clear reading strategy we can come away from every difficult text with a greater understanding of the topic and questions that can guide us as we synthesize the material.

“If your reading assignments confound you, if they send you into slumber, or you avoid them, or they seem to take you way too long, then pay attention. Based on my experience as a frustrated student and now as a teacher of reading strategies, I have some insights to share with you designed to make the reading process more productive, more interesting, and more enjoyable.”

MLA Citation Examples

Works Cited

Rosenberg, Karen. Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing Volume 2 , edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, Parlor Press, 2011, pp. 210-220.

In-text citation

Rosenberg, K. (2011). Reading games: Strategies for reading scholarly sources. In Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky (Eds.), Writing spaces: readings on writing , vol. 2 (pp. 210-220). New York: Parlor Press.

Chicago Citation Examples

Bibliography

Rosenberg, Karen. “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources,” in Writing Spaces: Reading on Writing Volume 2 , ed. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky (New York: Parlor Press, 2011), 210-220.

About the Author

name: Volume 2 Writing Spaces

institution: Parlor Press and WAC Clearinghouse

website: https://writingspaces.org/writing-spaces-volume-2/

Released in 2010, the first issue of Writing Spaces was edited by Drs. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. In addition to the Writing Spaces Website, volume 2 can be accessed through WAC Clearinghouse, as well as Parlor Press.

From Parlor Press

Volume 2 continues the tradition of the previous volume with topics, such as the rhetorical situation, collaboration, documentation styles, weblogs, invention, writing assignment interpretation, reading critically, information literacy, ethnography, interviewing, argument, document design, and source integration.

From WAC Clearinghouse

Charles Lowe is Assistant Professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University where he teachers composition, professional writing, and Web design. Pavel Zemliansky is Associate Professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University.

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3.3 Effective Reading Strategies

Questions to Consider:

What methods can you incorporate into your routine to allow adequate time for reading?
What are the benefits and approaches to active and critical reading?
Do your courses or major have specific reading requirements?

Allowing Adequate Time for Reading

You should determine the reading requirements and expectations for every class very early in the semester. You also need to understand why you are reading the particular text you are assigned. Do you need to read closely for minute details that determine cause and effect? Or is your instructor asking you to skim several sources so you become more familiar with the topic? Knowing this reasoning will help you decide your timing, what notes to take, and how best to undertake the reading assignment.

Depending on the makeup of your schedule, you may end up reading both primary sources—such as legal documents, historic letters, or diaries—as well as textbooks, articles, and secondary sources, such as summaries or argumentative essays that use primary sources to stake a claim. You may also need to read current journalistic texts to stay up to date in local or global affairs. A realistic approach to scheduling your time to allow you to read and review all the reading you have for the semester will help you accomplish what can sometimes seem like an overwhelming task.

When you allow adequate time in your hectic schedule for reading, you are investing in your own success. Reading isn’t a magic pill, but it may seem like it when you consider all the benefits people reap from this ordinary practice. Famous successful people throughout history have been voracious readers. In fact, former U.S. president Harry Truman once said, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” Writer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, inventor, and also former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson claimed “I cannot live without books” at a time when keeping and reading books was an expensive pastime. Knowing what it meant to be kept from the joys of reading, 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” And finally, George R. R. Martin, the prolific author of the wildly successful Game of Thrones empire, declared, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.”

You can make time for reading in a number of ways that include determining your usual reading pace and speed, scheduling active reading sessions, and practicing recursive reading strategies.

Determining Reading Speed and Pacing

To determine your reading speed, select a section of text—passages in a textbook or pages in a novel. Time yourself reading that material for exactly 5 minutes, and note how much reading you accomplished in those 5 minutes. Multiply the amount of reading you accomplished in 5 minutes by 12 to determine your average reading pace (5 times 12 equals the 60 minutes of an hour). Of course, your reading pace will be different and take longer if you are taking notes while you read, but this calculation of reading pace gives you a good way to estimate your reading speed that you can adapt to other forms of reading.

In the table above, you can see three students with different reading speeds. So, for instance, if Marta was able to read 4 pages of a dense novel for her English class in 5 minutes, she should be able to read about 48 pages in one hour. Knowing this, Marta can accurately determine how much time she needs to devote to finishing the novel within a set amount of time, instead of just guessing. If the novel Marta is reading is 497 pages, then Marta would take the total page count (497) and divide that by her hourly reading rate (48 pages/hour) to determine that she needs about 10 to 11 hours overall. To finish the novel spread out over two weeks, Marta needs to read a little under an hour a day to accomplish this goal.

Calculating your reading rate in this manner does not take into account days where you’re too distracted and you have to reread passages or days when you just aren’t in the mood to read. And your reading rate will likely vary depending on how dense the content you’re reading is (e.g., a complex textbook vs. a comic book). Your pace may slow down somewhat if you are not very interested in what the text is about. What this method will help you do is be realistic about your reading time as opposed to waging a guess based on nothing and then becoming worried when you have far more reading to finish than the time available.

Chapter 2 , “ Managing Your Time and Priorities ,” offers more detail on how best to determine your speed from one type of reading to the next so you are better able to schedule your reading.

Scheduling Set Times for Active Reading

Active reading takes longer than reading through passages without stopping. You may not need to read your latest sci-fi series actively while you’re lounging on the beach, but many other reading situations demand more attention from you. Active reading is particularly important for college courses. You are a scholar actively engaging with the text by posing questions, seeking answers, and clarifying any confusing elements. Plan to spend at least twice as long to read actively than to read passages without taking notes or otherwise marking select elements of the text.

To determine the time you need for active reading, use the same calculations you use to determine your traditional reading speed and double it. Remember that you need to determine your reading pace for all the classes you have in a particular semester and multiply your speed by the number of classes you have that require different types of reading. The table below shows the differences in time needed between reading quickly without taking notes and reading actively.

Practicing Recursive Reading Strategies

One fact about reading for college courses that may become frustrating is that, in a way, it never ends. For all the reading you do, you end up doing even more rereading. It may be the same content, but you may be reading the passage more than once to detect the emphasis the writer places on one aspect of the topic or how frequently the writer dismisses a significant counterargument. This rereading is called recursive reading.

For most of what you read at the college level, you are trying to make sense of the text for a specific purpose—not just because the topic interests or entertains you. You need your full attention to decipher everything that’s going on in complex reading material—and you even need to be considering what the writer of the piece may not be including and why. This is why reading for comprehension is recursive.

Specifically, this boils down to seeing reading not as a formula but as a process that is far more circular than linear. You may read a selection from beginning to end, which is an excellent starting point, but for comprehension, you’ll need to go back and reread passages to determine meaning and make connections between the reading and the bigger learning environment that led you to the selection—that may be a single course or a program in your college, or it may be the larger discipline, such as all biologists or the community of scholars studying beach erosion.

People often say writing is rewriting. For college courses, reading is rereading, but rereading with the intention of improving comprehension and taking notes.

Strong readers engage in numerous steps, sometimes combining more than one step simultaneously, but knowing the steps nonetheless. They include, not always in this order:

bringing any prior knowledge about the topic to the reading session,
asking yourself pertinent questions, both orally and in writing, about the content you are reading,
inferring and/or implying information from what you read,
learning unfamiliar discipline-specific terms,
evaluating what you are reading, and eventually,
applying what you’re reading to other learning and life situations you encounter.

Let’s break these steps into manageable chunks, because you are actually doing quite a lot when you read.

Accessing Prior Knowledge

When you read, you naturally think of anything else you may know about the topic, but when you read deliberately and actively, you make yourself more aware of accessing this prior knowledge. Have you ever watched a documentary about this topic? Did you study some aspect of it in another class? Do you have a hobby that is somehow connected to this material? All of this thinking will help you make sense of what you are reading.

Application

Imagine that you were given a chapter to read in your American history class about the Gettysburg Address, now write down what you already know about this historic document. How might thinking through this prior knowledge help you better understand the text?

Asking Questions

Humans are naturally curious beings. As you read actively, you should be asking questions about the topic you are reading. Don’t just say the questions in your mind; write them down. You may ask: Why is this topic important? What is the relevance of this topic currently? Was this topic important a long time ago but irrelevant now? Why did my professor assign this reading?

You need a place where you can actually write down these questions; a separate page in your notes is a good place to begin. If you are taking notes on your computer, start a new document and write down the questions. Leave some room to answer the questions when you begin and again after you read.

Inferring and Implying

When you read, you can take the information on the page and infer , or conclude responses to related challenges from evidence or from your own reasoning. A student will likely be able to infer what material the professor will include on an exam by taking good notes throughout the classes leading up to the test.

Writers may imply information without directly stating a fact for a variety of reasons. Sometimes a writer may not want to come out explicitly and state a bias, but may imply or hint at his or her preference for one political party or another. You have to read carefully to find implications because they are indirect, but watching for them will help you comprehend the whole meaning of a passage.

Learning Vocabulary

Vocabulary specific to certain disciplines helps practitioners in that field engage and communicate with each other. Few people beyond undertakers and archeologists likely use the term sarcophagus in everyday communications, but for those disciplines, it is a meaningful distinction. Looking at the example, you can use context clues to figure out the meaning of the term sarcophagus because it is something undertakers and/or archeologists would recognize. At the very least, you can guess that it has something to do with death. As a potential professional in the field you’re studying, you need to know the lingo. You may already have a system in place to learn discipline-specific vocabulary, so use what you know works for you. Two strong strategies are to look up words in a dictionary (online or hard copy) to ensure you have the exact meaning for your discipline and to keep a dedicated list of words you see often in your reading. You can list the words with a short definition so you have a quick reference guide to help you learn the vocabulary.

Intelligent people always question and evaluate. This doesn’t mean they don’t trust others; they just need verification of facts to understand a topic well. It doesn’t make sense to learn incomplete or incorrect information about a subject just because you didn’t take the time to evaluate all the sources at your disposal. When early explorers were afraid to sail the world for fear of falling off the edge, they weren’t stupid; they just didn’t have all the necessary data to evaluate the situation.

When you evaluate a text, you are seeking to understand the presented topic. Depending on how long the text is, you will perform a number of steps and repeat many of these steps to evaluate all the elements the author presents. When you evaluate a text, you need to do the following:

Scan the title and all headings.
Read through the entire passage fully.
Question what main point the author is making.
Decide who the audience is.
Identify what evidence/support the author uses.
Consider if the author presents a balanced perspective on the main point.
Recognize if the author introduced any biases in the text.

When you go through a text looking for each of these elements, you need to go beyond just answering the surface question; for instance, the audience may be a specific field of scientists, but could anyone else understand the text with some explanation? Why would that be important?

Analysis Question

Think of an article you need to read for a class. Take the steps above on how to evaluate a text, and apply the steps to the article. When you accomplish the task in each step, ask yourself and take notes to answer the question: Why is this important? For example, when you read the title, does that give you any additional information that will help you comprehend the text? If the text were written for a different audience, what might the author need to change to accommodate that group? How does an author’s bias distort an argument? This deep evaluation allows you to fully understand the main ideas and place the text in context with other material on the same subject, with current events, and within the discipline.

When you learn something new, it always connects to other knowledge you already have. One challenge we have is applying new information. It may be interesting to know the distance to the moon, but how do we apply it to something we need to do? If your biology instructor asked you to list several challenges of colonizing Mars and you do not know much about that planet’s exploration, you may be able to use your knowledge of how far Earth is from the moon to apply it to the new task. You may have to read several other texts in addition to reading graphs and charts to find this information.

That was the challenge the early space explorers faced along with myriad unknowns before space travel was a more regular occurrence. They had to take what they already knew and could study and read about and apply it to an unknown situation. These explorers wrote down their challenges, failures, and successes, and now scientists read those texts as a part of the ever-growing body of text about space travel. Application is a sophisticated level of thinking that helps turn theory into practice and challenges into successes.

Preparing to Read for Specific Disciplines in College

Different disciplines in college may have specific expectations, but you can depend on all subjects asking you to read to some degree. In this college reading requirement, you can succeed by learning to read actively, researching the topic and author, and recognizing how your own preconceived notions affect your reading. Reading for college isn’t the same as reading for pleasure or even just reading to learn something on your own because you are casually interested.

In college courses, your instructor may ask you to read articles, chapters, books, or primary sources (those original documents about which we write and study, such as letters between historic figures or the Declaration of Independence). Your instructor may want you to have a general background on a topic before you dive into that subject in class, so that you know the history of a topic, can start thinking about it, and can engage in a class discussion with more than a passing knowledge of the issue.

If you are about to participate in an in-depth six-week consideration of the U.S. Constitution but have never read it or anything written about it, you will have a hard time looking at anything in detail or understanding how and why it is significant. As you can imagine, a great deal has been written about the Constitution by scholars and citizens since the late 1700s when it was first put to paper (that’s how they did it then). While the actual document isn’t that long (about 12–15 pages depending on how it is presented), learning the details on how it came about, who was involved, and why it was and still is a significant document would take a considerable amount of time to read and digest. So, how do you do it all? Especially when you may have an instructor who drops hints that you may also love to read a historic novel covering the same time period . . . in your spare time , not required, of course! It can be daunting, especially if you are taking more than one course that has time-consuming reading lists. With a few strategic techniques, you can manage it all, but know that you must have a plan and schedule your required reading so you are also able to pick up that recommended historic novel—it may give you an entirely new perspective on the issue.

Strategies for Reading in College Disciplines

No universal law exists for how much reading instructors and institutions expect college students to undertake for various disciplines. Suffice it to say, it’s a LOT.

For most students, it is the volume of reading that catches them most off guard when they begin their college careers. A full course load might require 10–15 hours of reading per week, some of that covering content that will be more difficult than the reading for other courses.

You cannot possibly read word-for-word every single document you need to read for all your classes. That doesn’t mean you give up or decide to only read for your favorite classes or concoct a scheme to read 17 percent for each class and see how that works for you. You need to learn to skim, annotate, and take notes. All of these techniques will help you comprehend more of what you read, which is why we read in the first place. We’ll talk more later about annotating and note-taking, but for now consider what you know about skimming as opposed to active reading.

Skimming is not just glancing over the words on a page (or screen) to see if any of it sticks. Effective skimming allows you to take in the major points of a passage without the need for a time-consuming reading session that involves your active use of notations and annotations. Often you will need to engage in that painstaking level of active reading, but skimming is the first step—not an alternative to deep reading. The fact remains that neither do you need to read everything nor could you possibly accomplish that given your limited time. So learn this valuable skill of skimming as an accompaniment to your overall study tool kit, and with practice and experience, you will fully understand how valuable it is.

When you skim, look for guides to your understanding: headings, definitions, pull quotes, tables, and context clues. Textbooks are often helpful for skimming—they may already have made some of these skimming guides in bold or a different color, and chapters often follow a predictable outline. Some even provide an overview and summary for sections or chapters. Use whatever you can get, but don’t stop there. In textbooks that have some reading guides, or especially in texts that do not, look for introductory words such as First or The purpose of this article . . . or summary words such as In conclusion . . . or Finally . These guides will help you read only those sentences or paragraphs that will give you the overall meaning or gist of a passage or book.

Now move to the meat of the passage. You want to take in the reading as a whole. For a book, look at the titles of each chapter if available. Read each chapter’s introductory paragraph and determine why the writer chose this particular order. Depending on what you’re reading, the chapters may be only informational, but often you’re looking for a specific argument. What position is the writer claiming? What support, counterarguments, and conclusions is the writer presenting?

Don’t think of skimming as a way to buzz through a boring reading assignment. It is a skill you should master so you can engage, at various levels, with all the reading you need to accomplish in college. End your skimming session with a few notes—terms to look up, questions you still have, and an overall summary. And recognize that you likely will return to that book or article for a more thorough reading if the material is useful.

Active Reading Strategies

Active reading differs significantly from skimming or reading for pleasure. You can think of active reading as a sort of conversation between you and the text (maybe between you and the author, but you don’t want to get the author’s personality too involved in this metaphor because that may skew your engagement with the text).

When you sit down to determine what your different classes expect you to read and you create a reading schedule to ensure you complete all the reading, think about when you should read the material strategically, not just how to get it all done . You should read textbook chapters and other reading assignments before you go into a lecture about that information. Don’t wait to see how the lecture goes before you read the material, or you may not understand the information in the lecture. Reading before class helps you put ideas together between your reading and the information you hear and discuss in class.

Different disciplines naturally have different types of texts, and you need to take this into account when you schedule your time for reading class material. For example, you may look at a poem for your world literature class and assume that it will not take you long to read because it is relatively short compared to the dense textbook you have for your economics class. But reading and understanding a poem can take a considerable amount of time when you realize you may need to stop numerous times to review the separate word meanings and how the words form images and connections throughout the poem.

The SQ3R Reading Strategy

You may have heard of the SQ3R method for active reading in your early education. This valuable technique is perfect for college reading. The title stands for S urvey, Q uestion, R ead, R ecite, R eview, and you can use the steps on virtually any assigned passage. Designed by Francis Pleasant Robinson in his 1961 book Effective Study, the active reading strategy gives readers a systematic way to work through any reading material.

Survey is similar to skimming. You look for clues to meaning by reading the titles, headings, introductions, summary, captions for graphics, and keywords. You can survey almost anything connected to the reading selection, including the copyright information, the date of the journal article, or the names and qualifications of the author(s). In this step, you decide what the general meaning is for the reading selection.

Question is your creation of questions to seek the main ideas, support, examples, and conclusions of the reading selection. Ask yourself these questions separately. Try to create valid questions about what you are about to read that have come into your mind as you engaged in the Survey step. Try turning the headings of the sections in the chapter into questions. Next, how does what you’re reading relate to you, your school, your community, and the world?

Read is when you actually read the passage. Try to find the answers to questions you developed in the previous step. Decide how much you are reading in chunks, either by paragraph for more complex readings or by section or even by an entire chapter. When you finish reading the selection, stop to make notes. Answer the questions by writing a note in the margin or other white space of the text.

You may also carefully underline or highlight text in addition to your notes. Use caution here that you don’t try to rush this step by haphazardly circling terms or the other extreme of underlining huge chunks of text. Don’t over-mark. You aren’t likely to remember what these cryptic marks mean later when you come back to use this active reading session to study. The text is the source of information—your marks and notes are just a way to organize and make sense of that information.

Recite means to speak out loud. By reciting, you are engaging other senses to remember the material—you read it (visual) and you said it (auditory). Stop reading momentarily in the step to answer your questions or clarify confusing sentences or paragraphs. You can recite a summary of what the text means to you. If you are not in a place where you can verbalize, such as a library or classroom, you can accomplish this step adequately by saying it in your head; however, to get the biggest bang for your buck, try to find a place where you can speak aloud. You may even want to try explaining the content to a friend.

Review is a recap. Go back over what you read and add more notes, ensuring you have captured the main points of the passage, identified the supporting evidence and examples, and understood the overall meaning. You may need to repeat some or all of the SQR3 steps during your review depending on the length and complexity of the material. Before you end your active reading session, write a short (no more than one page is optimal) summary of the text you read.

Reading Primary and Secondary Sources

Primary sources are original documents we study and from which we glean information; primary sources include letters, first editions of books, legal documents, and a variety of other texts. When scholars look at these documents to understand a period in history or a scientific challenge and then write about their findings, the scholar’s article is considered a secondary source. Readers have to keep several factors in mind when reading both primary and secondary sources.

Primary sources may contain dated material we now know is inaccurate. It may contain personal beliefs and biases the original writer didn’t intend to be openly published, and it may even present fanciful or creative ideas that do not support current knowledge. Readers can still gain great insight from primary sources, but readers need to understand the context from which the writer of the primary source wrote the text.

Likewise, secondary sources are inevitably another person’s perspective on the primary source, so a reader of secondary sources must also be aware of potential biases or preferences the secondary source writer inserts in the writing that may persuade an incautious reader to interpret the primary source in a particular manner.

For example, if you were to read a secondary source that is examining the U.S. Declaration of Independence (the primary source), you would have a much clearer idea of how the secondary source scholar presented the information from the primary source if you also read the Declaration for yourself instead of trusting the other writer’s interpretation. Most scholars are honest in writing secondary sources, but you as a reader of the source are trusting the writer to present a balanced perspective of the primary source. When possible, you should attempt to read a primary source in conjunction with the secondary source. The Internet helps immensely with this practice.

Researching Topic and Author

During your preview stage, sometimes called pre-reading, you can easily pick up on information from various sources that may help you understand the material you’re reading more fully or place it in context with other important works in the discipline. If your selection is a book, flip it over or turn to the back pages and look for an author’s biography or note from the author. See if the book itself contains any other information about the author or the subject matter.

The main things you need to recall from your reading in college are the topics covered and how the information fits into the discipline. You can find these parts throughout the textbook chapter in the form of headings in larger and bold font, summary lists, and important quotations pulled out of the narrative. Use these features as you read to help you determine what the most important ideas are.

Remember, many books use quotations about the book or author as testimonials in a marketing approach to sell more books, so these may not be the most reliable sources of unbiased opinions, but it’s a start. Sometimes you can find a list of other books the author has written near the front of a book. Do you recognize any of the other titles? Can you do an Internet search for the name of the book or author? Go beyond the search results that want you to buy the book and see if you can glean any other relevant information about the author or the reading selection. Beyond a standard Internet search, try the library article database. These are more relevant to academic disciplines and contain resources you typically will not find in a standard search engine. If you are unfamiliar with how to use the library database, ask a reference librarian on campus. They are often underused resources that can point you in the right direction.

Understanding Your Own Preset Ideas on a Topic

Consider this scenario: Laura really enjoys learning about environmental issues. She has read many books and watched numerous televised documentaries on this topic and actively seeks out additional information on the environment. While Laura’s interest can help her understand a new reading encounter about the environment, Laura also has to be aware that with this interest, she brings forward her preset ideas and biases about the topic. Sometimes these prejudices against other ideas relate to religion or nationality or even just tradition. Without evidence, thinking the way we always have is not a good enough reason; evidence can change, and at the very least it needs honest review and assessment to determine its validity. Ironically, we may not want to learn new ideas because that may mean we would have to give up old ideas we have already mastered, which can be a daunting prospect.

With every reading situation about the environment, Laura needs to remain open-minded about what she is about to read and pay careful attention if she begins to ignore certain parts of the text because of her preconceived notions. Learning new information can be very difficult if you balk at ideas that are different from what you’ve always thought. You may have to force yourself to listen to a different viewpoint multiple times to make sure you are not closing your mind to a viable solution your mindset does not currently allow.

Can you think of times you have struggled reading college content for a course? Which of these strategies might have helped you understand the content? Why do you think those strategies would work?

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Authors: Amy Baldwin
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Book title: College Success Concise
Publication date: Apr 19, 2023
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Academic Success in Online Programs pp 111–124 Cite as

Skills and Strategies for Research and Reading

Jacqueline S. Stephen ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8949-5895 2
First Online: 03 April 2024

Part of the book series: Springer Texts in Education ((SPTE))

In addition to study skills and study habits, students need to be able to effectively engage in the process of research and college-level reading. Chapter 8 explains the significance of effective research and reading skills on academic performance. There are many types of research activities that college and university students are expected to actively participate in to complete various course requirements. Similarly, there are many different forms of literature that a student will encounter while engaging in the research process. College and university libraries provide access to a many of resources to support students through the research process. Thus, this chapter introduces students to the different types of research activities they can expect to engage in through their courses, explains the different forms of literature that a student may encounter during the research process, and provides insight into the many resources that libraries often provide to support student research activities and student development of college-level research skills. One of the areas of student development is in reading skills. Hence, Chapter 8 explains the various types of reading materials that a student may encounter in college or university courses, provides information on the styles of reading academic texts, and presents strategies to promote effective research and reading, including best practices for evaluating the relevancy and credibility of information sources.

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Stephen, J.S. (2024). Skills and Strategies for Research and Reading. In: Academic Success in Online Programs. Springer Texts in Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54439-2_8

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17 Fun Ways To Teach Reading Comprehension Strategies

Reading Comprehension Strategies Blog Hero

Reading comprehension strategies are frameworks readers use to understand text. When students learn comprehension strategies they become more active readers. Plus, they’re more likely to read with purpose and feel more in control of their reading abilities. In this article, we’ll show you 17 strategies your students can use to understand the texts they read and give tips on how to make teaching these skills more interactive and fun.

17 strategies for reading comprehension (and how to make them fun to learn)

Do certain reading comprehension strategies work better for different grade bands, teach reading comprehension strategies with newsela.

Explore reading comprehension strategies you can teach your students and how you can take them from skill-and-drill memorization to fun, interactive experiences:

1. Using metacognition

Metacognition is a concept that means “thinking about thinking.” Students can use metacognition strategies before, during, and after reading to track their comprehension of a text:

Before reading they may set a purpose for reading and preview the text. Use a goal-setting journaling activity that can guide them as they try to understand the text.

During reading , students may adjust how they read to ensure they comprehend the main idea and details, such as rereading a sentence or reading more slowly. Having students complete a Write-Pair-Share activity can help them think more closely about the content they’re reading and what they’ll do with that information when they’re done.

After reading , students can check their understanding of what they read, usually with a teacher-recommended assignment or assessment. For example, have students write a letter to future students who will read this content. Have them summarize what the future students should expect to learn.

Metacognition strategies and thought processes appear in many of the other reading comprehension strategies students use, which you’ll discover below.

2. Activating prior knowledge

When a student activates prior knowledge, they use what they already know to make sense of a new text that they read. It includes both their own life experiences and things they’ve learned in the past as a framework for comprehending new information .

With Newsela knowledge and skill-building products , you can use annotations and assign a color to each type of text connection. Then have students highlight details within a text that fit each category.

Try alphabet brainstorming to help students activate prior knowledge. Share the main text topic and brainstorm things that students know about it that match each letter of the alphabet. Some letters are trickier than others!

3. Building background knowledge

Activating prior knowledge is a great strategy for helping students with reading comprehension/ But what if they don’t have the life experience or past learning to relate to a new topic? Teachers can help make up for these gaps when they build background knowledge about a text and its topics before and during a lesson.

This strategy scaffolds students into the new material so they’re able to make sense of what they’re reading. With Newsela ELA , you can build background knowledge on any topic, as well as a variety of fiction and nonfiction books with our Novel and Book Studies collection . Use articles, videos, infographics, and interactive activities to make sure students have the context of a topic before diving into a new text.

4. Previewing a text

Using prior and background knowledge as a guide, students can preview a text before they read. Previewing allows students to get familiar with the structure and content of the piece before they do close reading.

Turn previewing a text into a scavenger hunt. Invite students to scan the material and look for words or phrases that match the information mentioned during the whole-class alphabet brainstorm. Have them journal the clues and matches they find.

5. Predicting

Making predictions about a text before students read helps them activate their background and prior knowledge and tap into metacognition. It encourages them to use what they already know and set up a framework for thinking about the text as they read. As they gain more knowledge, they may revise their predictions based on new evidence. That means predicting isn’t just a before-reading skill. Students can use it at any time during the reading process to stay actively engaged in a text.

Pair a predicting exercise with a preview scan of the text and use the information students find during the scavenger hunt to make a Clue-style prediction. Have them decide:

Who or what is the main character or main idea of the text?

Where does the story take place or why does this information matter?

What will be the outcome of the story or text?

6. Self-monitoring comprehension

Students who can monitor their comprehension know when they read something they understand and when they don’t. This can be a difficult skill for new readers because they’re less familiar with the process of exploring a text. The earlier they can learn this comprehension skill, the sooner they’ll be able to form a deeper understanding of texts and feel empowered to practice and read independently.

You can model and help students practice self-monitoring by adding time for reflection on what they’d read, asking them to use prior knowledge to make connections, and encouraging the use of “fix-up” strategies as they read. Adding polls on Newsela also helps students self-monitor their comprehension while previewing a text and predicting what could happen next.

7. Using “fix-ups”

When students are working to master self-monitoring their comprehension they also learn how to use “fix-up” strategies. When they read something they don’t understand, they use tools or strategies to help them fill the gaps on their own.

Have students create a dictionary or thesaurus journal with the words they look up. They can record the word, part of speech, definition, and synonyms. They can also include the text that prompted them to look up each word and any other notes they want to make. On Newsela ELA, our built-in Power Words support “fix-ups” by providing Tier III vocabulary and definitions right within a text.

8. Recognizing story or text structure

Students learn to start identifying parts of a story’s structure as early as preschool or kindergarten. As they advance in school, they learn more about other text structures found most often in expository nonfiction texts. If they can identify what type of text structure they’re reading, they have more clues about how the information is organized and where the main idea and key details could be within the text.

Read more: 9 Ways To Make Teaching Text Structure Fun for Students

9. Using graphic organizers

Graphic organizers help show concepts or relationships visually. There are a variety of different kinds of graphic organizers students can use to visualize concepts in text like maps, charts, webs, or graphs. In narrative texts, story maps are a great way to teach students story grammar. With expository texts, KWL charts, tree diagrams, tables, and flowcharts help organize ideas. With Newsela, students can use interactive graphic organizers embedded in articles and customize them with Formative, or download printable versions to teach specific text structures.

Download your printables: KWL chart and story map

10. Visualizing

Studies show that students who can visualize what they read have better comprehension and recall than those who can’t. This is why toddler books and picture books are full of images to help students understand how the words and the meaning of the story go together. This type of visualization doesn’t have to stop when students start reading more complex texts with fewer visuals.

Having students use all five senses when they read can help with visualization. Beyond just looking at images or describing the ones they see in their head, encourage students to think about what elements in a text may smell like, sound like, or feel like to touch. Ask students to storyboard or draw comic strips to illustrate what they see in their minds when they’re reading a text. Eventually, you can scaffold students to have these images appear only in their heads while they read without having to draw them out on paper or a tablet.

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11. Answering questions

Question-Answer Relationship strategy (QAR) helps students learn how to answer questions better. It encourages students to share whether the information they used to answer a question came directly from the text, if it was implied in the text, or if they answered based on their own background knowledge.

Make answering questions more fun by creating a “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire” game, turning the students into contestants who must answer questions about the text to win a fictional prize. Add lifelines to your game like 50/50, ask the audience, or phone a friend to encourage students to help each other learn and comprehend a text. Using the embedded quizzes in Newsela articles is also a way to prompt students to answer comprehension questions as they read.

12. Asking questions

After students learn how to answer certain types of questions, they can start asking their own. Rather than waiting for a teacher to ask guiding comprehension questions, students can ask themselves if they can find key details or the main idea of a passage. When students advance to asking questions, it also provides opportunities for students to talk together about what they read and check each other’s comprehension.

As students practice creating their own questions, have them think like journalists. Pair them in twos to interview each other about the topic. Add a writing component to encourage them to record their interviews with one another.

13. Determining key details

To understand a text, students should be able to determine what’s truly important in a story instead of just what’s interesting. For example, in a fiction story, plot points that lead to the conflict are important. The author might also describe in detail what the characters are wearing, but if their outfits don’t have anything to do with the plot, their clothes aren’t key details. Similarly, in expository or nonfiction texts, students should be able to separate facts from opinions and know how the two different categories of information relate to the main idea of the text.

A fun way to teach about key details vs. extraneous information is to get students to solve mysteries that have red herrings, or misleading clues. Game companies make age-appropriate card sets for this type of activity, but you can also create your own scenarios. When creating your mysteries, make sure all the information students need to “crack the case” appears in the text they read or that you read out loud. Also, include some details to try to throw them off.

You can have students work independently or in groups to try to solve the mystery. At the end of the activity, use a whole-class discussion to talk about what clues were important for solving the case and which ones were extraneous. This exercise, when you repeat it over time, should help students learn how to pick out key details in a text.

14. Making inferences

Authors don’t always explicitly state everything they want a reader to know in the text. We have to read between the lines to understand what they mean and make connections. During and after reading, students can make inferences about things the author doesn’t say outright. To do this, they must have the right background knowledge to understand the text and recognize clues in what’s written.

To help students practice learning how to make inferences, try playing word association games, like Password , in class. Word associations encourage students to think about what they know and draw conclusions about words that may describe or characterize a person, place, or thing.

15. Summarizing

Summarizing requires students to decide what’s important when reading and share it in their own words. When summarizing expository texts, students should be able to share the main idea of a passage and the key details that support it. To help students practice summarizing, do an activity that’s a twist on “Blind Date With a Book.”

Have students write summaries for books, novels, or other texts that the entire class reads. After students have read three or more texts, share some of the summaries with the class and see if they can guess which text each one matches. Provide a list of the possible texts for reference. The more texts you add, the more challenging it is. Whether the class guesses correctly or not, ask students to name one additional detail they would add to the summary or one they would remove to make it even clearer.

16. Retelling

You and your students can think of retelling as the narrative version of summarizing. Having students retell a story in their own words forces them to analyze the content, decide what’s important, and share that information with others orally, in writing, or through another means of expression. To practice retelling, you can play a modified version of the game “Telephone.”

Split students into groups of 3-5 team members, depending on the size of your class. Give the first student in the chain the name of a book or text that everyone in the class has read. They must retell the story to the next person in the chain in four sentences or less. The second person must relay the retelling to the next person and so on until it gets to the end of the chain. The last person must pick the text that was retold to them. Repeat the exercise so students have a chance to be at the beginning, middle, and end of each chain.

For a challenging twist, instruct the students in the middle of the chain to guess which text the person before them is describing. They can then choose to either remove or replace a detail in the retelling or keep it the same before they share it with the next person in the chain.

17. Synthesizing

Synthesizing information during reading brings together many other comprehension skills students use to create something new with the information they’ve learned. It involves activating prior knowledge and background knowledge, making inferences from the text, making text connections, and summarizing or retelling the information learned in their own words. A fun synthesizing activity is to have students reimagine a text in a new way.

For a narrative fictional story, this might look like taking a fairy tale and reimagining one key element. What if Cinderella never lost her slipper? What if Sleeping Beauty was set in the 2020s? For expository or nonfiction texts, synthesizing might look like taking the opposing stance of the author in a pro/con debate. Creating a reimagining activity for students lets them show what they’ve learned in their own ways, either through writing, art, performance, or another medium.

Reading comprehension strategies build on one another. When you’re teaching reading comprehension, it’s better to start with more basic strategies and work students up to more complex ones. Because you likely don’t teach reading comprehension to students during their entire academic careers, it’s helpful to know which strategies are most effective for each grade band:

Early elementary (Grades K-2)

Early elementary students are just starting their reading comprehension journey. It’s important to stress, practice, and reteach some of the most basic reading comprehension strategies with this grade band. Although you can teach other strategies to early elementary students, try starting with these:

Mid- and upper-elementary (Grades 3-5)

Mid-elementary students have a foundation for reading comprehension but are still adding tools to their mental toolboxes. At this stage, teachers can start to scaffold up some of those foundational skills to make them more complex. You can teach any reading comprehension strategy for mid-elementary students, but these strategies are a good primary focus:

Middle school (Grades 6-8)

In middle school, readers are often more comfortable using their foundational comprehension skills independently. For this grade band, focusing on how to process and use a text to form their own thoughts and opinions can be helpful.

High school (Grades 9-12)

Many high school students have a large toolbox of reading comprehension strategies and know how to apply them to increasingly complex texts. In this grade band, it’s important to stress the right time to use each strategy and how using one strategy or a combination of them can help students develop their own ideas based on a text.

With over 15,000 texts across 20+ genres, Newsela products let you teach reading comprehension strategies during your lessons or provide students choices to get them reading in their free time about topics that interest them. With Newsela ELA , you can practice other literacy skills along with reading comprehension strategies. With Newsela Social Studies and Newsela Science , you can use the same scaffolds and supports to encourage reading comprehension practice in subjects outside of ELA.

Not a Newsela customer yet? You can experience all the content and skill-building activities our products have to offer by signing up for Newsela Lite for your classroom today.

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Reading Mastery: Strategies Unveiled Essay

Strategic reading tutoring, advantages of strategic reading tutoring, prior knowledge activation, summarizing reading strategy, posing questions reading strategy, correlation between reading and writing, sign up for tutoring today.

The contemporary world is ruled by technology that can positively or negatively affect different human activities. One such activity is reading with a variety of books, articles, and texts being available online. Research suggests that digital distractions and technology adversely impact reading comprehension and the acquisition of general knowledge (Wexler, 2021). For children in particular, reading can become challenging if interruptions are not removed. Even if digital hindrances are eliminated, the level of comprehension can be shallow if the activity of reading is not purposeful and focused. Tutoring on strategic reading can introduce students to reading strategies to enhance their reading skills and comprehension.

Strategic reading tutoring is highly beneficial and can help students of different ages improve their reading skills and build general knowledge. It is widely accepted that tutoring on reading contributes to pupils honing a broader vocabulary, stronger communication skills, and improved writing ability (C2 Education, 2019). In addition, a higher level of reading comprehension translates into the development of critical thinking skills (C2 Education, 2019). Individual reading tutoring provides a positive learning space and a unique learning experience for students who want to boost their reading and comprehension. In addition, an individualized approach to strategic reading helps improve attitudes towards reading and learning as a whole, enhancing their academic experience and performance while encouraging independence and responsibility. Overall, unlike education in a classroom, tutoring allows for a better understanding and satisfaction of student learning needs and the effective elimination of learning obstacles.

The complexity of a text can deter anyone from continuing to learn from the chosen reading. Nonetheless, a tricky topic can be easily approached if students are taught the strategy of utilizing prior knowledge on the topic to understand the text. According to a research study carried out by Babayigit (2019), active referral to existing knowledge translates into greater comprehension and learning outcomes. This strategy teaches readers to consider what they know about the topic before starting a reading. Before getting involved in reading, learners can brainstorm ideas and pose questions about the subject to realize what they already know (Wilkinson, 2023). In addition, Wilkinson (2023) suggests that developing a concept map and considering related topics can ease comprehension and knowledge retention. Overall, prior knowledge activation as a strategy encourages readers to reflect on what they already know before learning more.

No matter how long or complex a text is, it can always be reduced to a singular core idea. During a session, a tutor can offer learners to focus on searching for that one idea and reduce the reading or part of it to a sentence. This technique is better known as a summarizing reading strategy (Babayigit, 2019). Summarizing allows readers to focus on critical details of the assigned reading, particularly those about the main idea, characters, and even purpose of the text. In addition, summarizing can be used to synthesize and compare different texts, further developing reading as a skill (Wilkinson, 2023). Tutoring can help students learn how to identify the main idea of the text as well as how to write a summary effectively.

Questioning the text is another helpful strategy that can be taught during strategic reading tutoring. Research indicates that active pondering about the reading allows one to realize the comprehension rate and evaluate one’s communication with the reading (Babayigit, 2019). Babayigit (2019) suggests that questioning during reading deepens understanding and improves attention and focus on key details. The strategy can be employed together with other approaches to reading, including prior knowledge activation and summarizing, to heighten the overall understanding of the text and topic. Strategic reading tutoring can help guide students in the application of these strategies.

Learning how to read with deep comprehension and attention to detail has many advantages, including developing writing as a skill. According to Schoonen (2019), reading and writing share numerous subskills, including knowledge and processing fluency. Thus, with the active development of one skill, learners are setting up the foundation for the enhancement of the other. Moreover, it should be noted that many reading strategies, including summarizing, require students to engage in writing.

Overall, the simple truth is that it is impossible to escape reading in the modern world. From books and articles to content for learning entertainment and legal documents, texts permeate the daily lives of most people. Thus, reading strategies help people equip themselves for the challenges of the world. Moreover, considering the impact of strategic reading on writing and communication skills, strategic reading tutoring is a three-for-one deal not to miss.

Babayigit, Ö. (2019). Examination of the Metacognitive Reading Strategies of Secondary School Sixth Grade Students. International Journal of Progressive Education , 15 (3), 1–12.

C2 Education. (2019). The benefits of reading tutoring . Web.

Education Week . (2023). [Photograph]. Web.

Model Teaching . (2019). [Photograph]. Web.

Schoonen, R. (2019). Are reading and writing building on the same skills? The relationship between reading and writing in L1 and EFL . Reading and Writing , 32 , 511–535. Web.

Wexler, N. (2021). Yes, there is evidence that building knowledge boosts reading comprehension . Forbes. Web.

Wilkinson, J. (2023). Cognitive and metacognitive reading strategies . Conestoga. Web.

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Tools to Boost Students’ Reading Stamina

Try these strategies to help your students sustain their focus on reading for longer periods of time, and drive comprehension in the process.

Getting students to read independently for long periods of time has never been easy. Now, with devices designed to sap their attention sitting in their pockets, the challenge has become even greater.

A new survey by Ed Week found that more than half of teachers in grades 3-8 report their students’ reading stamina has “declined precipitously” in recent years. The findings line up with a 2014 meta-analysis, which concluded that for many U.S. students, the stamina required to sustain their attention during independent reading and “interact with texts in a meaningful manner” is waning.

While some argue students should be developing their reading stamina at home—and teachers should be using their valuable class time on other priorities—the best-selling author and former educator Doug Lemov told Ed Week that kids need consistent practice in school to sharpen these muscles. “Should there be reading at home? Yeah, probably," he conceded, "but we should also read consistently in class, because that’s when I can wire their habits for sustained attention.”

When we turned to ask educators in our audience how they go about improving students’ reading stamina, many agreed with Lemov, saying that step one is building up the amount of daily independent reading time students receive.

As you build up students’ stamina, consider trying out some of the following approaches to ensure you’re setting students up for success—and that they’re getting the most out of the texts they’re reading.

A Little Experiment to Surface Distractions

To improve students’ attention spans, try calling their, well… attention to the issue. Neurologist, researcher, and classroom teacher Judy Willis writes that this could look like a self-awareness activity that helps students shatter the myth of multitasking and makes it clear just how much of their time and attention distractions consume.

First, ask students to make a list of all the potential distractions that come up for them as they read. These will likely include: cell phones, the internet, TV, and video games. Next, assign students a task to complete—like reading 10 or 15 pages of a novel—and ask them to do it one night with their main distractions available to them, and another night when their distractions are not available.

Students can then compare and contrast how much time it takes them to complete the task in each instance, and bring the differences they notice to class for a larger discussion. “After gathering and evaluating their data, students will no doubt find evidence showing which multitasking distractions waste time and diminish success,” says Willis. “Most kids believe they can have it all by multitasking. The fallacy is that when combining these activities with homework, they are getting less done, not more.”

The activity can also be used as justification for keeping your classroom clear of similar distractions, and for drilling down on the importance of rebuilding your students' attention span through frequent periods of sustained reading time.

Incremental Practice

Knowing you have to assign students more independent reading time is one thing, but doing it should be less like flipping a switch and more like developing a new exercise routine, writes educator Marile Mariana Stoneburg on Facebook . Stoneburg said that it’s important to “start small, start easy” and “alternate between increasing rigor and increasing time.”

Seventh grade teacher Katherine Marie wrote that she starts with 10 minutes of independent reading time, then builds up to 20 and eventually 30 minutes. Providing students with books they’re interested in, or the ability to choose what they read at times, goes a long way toward building—and solidifying—their endurance, according to Marie . “They build their reading stamina with books they choose and love,” she said. “Then when they have to dive into harder texts they don't get to choose, that built up stamina is there to fall back on!”

Educator Megan Reznicek Kersey adds that fun games help motivate her students to read for longer periods. Kersey’s seventh grade ELA students play “Game of Quotes,” during which they engage in silent reading—“start with a few minutes, build up to 20”—and then answer silly questions with lines from the book they’ve been reading.

Questions include: “What’s the last thing a bug says before hitting the windshield?” or “What's something written on a note you wouldn’t want your teacher to confiscate?” Students must search through the pages they’ve just read to find “funny, relevant” responses. Knowing they’ll have to go on this hunt, Kersey said, incentivizes them to read more: “The more they've read, the more they have to choose from.”

Chunk Material into Manageable Bites

Assigning students 20 minutes of classroom reading without building up their stamina will likely result in a good deal of closed eyes and (clandestine) cell phone scrolling.

Lemov told Ed Week that teachers can quickly build up to 20 or more minutes of uninterrupted reading time by breaking the time into smaller, consecutive tasks: Teacher read-alouds, student read-alouds in pairs, and silent reading on the same shared text, for example.

This “reading-cycle” might look like teachers reading the first few paragraphs of a text, students around the room taking on a few paragraphs of their own outloud, and a final period where students finish reading for a set time silently. At the end, Lemov assigns a brief period of writing and or discussion of the text. “It’s a sustained section of text, and we are practicing sustaining attention on it, with no break, for 20 minutes,” he told Ed Week .

High school social studies teacher Monique Anne says she takes a similar approach by applying the jigsaw method to sections of longer non-fiction texts. For example: Try asking students to take on smaller sections of a text (say, a few paragraphs) and work collaboratively to understand and explain its meaning to peers in a larger discussion about the text’s substance.

Anne told Edutopia that after using this strategy with students she transitions from shorter texts to whole texts in class, on their own: “they can hang in there for about 25-30 minutes,” she wrote, “I’m calling it a win!”

Breathing Exercises

One educator who teaches language learners recommended trying out breathing practice and similar mindfulness exercises before sustained reading practice, which can “release stress and increase concentration.”

Aukeem Ballard, a dean of students and former history teacher in California, said he incorporated mindfulness activities into each of his classrooms at least once a week. Even as little as five minutes, he told Edutopia, helped students boost working memory and tune out distractions—benefits that bode well for improved reading stamina.

A simple activity Ballard used was asking students to put their feet flat on the ground, close their eyes, and take deep breaths—in and out. “I guide students to follow where the air from their breath goes,” Ballard said. “While students are focusing on their breath, I invite them to reflect.” This reflection could be on the reading they’re about to engage in, a theme they’ve been discussing in class, or anything else.

Ballard invites students to spend another minute “having everyone, including myself, focus on how we’re showing up to the space.” Some students, Ballard said, might show up angry to class, or stressed because of their school work. “We always make sure to validate how we are showing up without judgment toward ourselves.”

To help students take the exercise seriously, Ballard found it useful to point students toward a list of research-backed benefits to mindfulness activities, including improved cognitive flexibility, reduced emotional reactivity, and reduced rumination on unwanted thoughts. “It is not strictly meditation, but rather a practice in supporting your mind to take care of yourself,” Ballard told students.

Check for Understanding

To ensure students are grasping the meaning of what they're reading while they’re building up their stamina—and not just staring at words on the page—quick checks for understanding can be useful.

Literacy expert and researcher Timothy Shanahan told Ed Week that short quizzes right after a sustained period of reading on a shared text can help teachers gauge how well students were able to make sense of the passages, and provide clues about further supports teachers might need to add, such as vocabulary review or discussions about narrative structure or sequencing. “If you have a six-page article about something in the Civil War, for instance, have them read the six pages and then instead of doing some activity right away, quiz them—find out how well they did,” Shanahan told Ed Week .

Do the quiz results show that they have “a better understanding about what happened earlier in the article?” Did their comprehension trail off as they continued to interact with the text? “Maybe they weren’t reading as carefully or maybe they didn’t know how to use that information and the second part just got harder,” Shanahan said.

A short quiz could include a few basic questions about plot, characters, key details, or dates, for example, and they don’t have to be graded.

High school history teacher Benjamin Barbour told Edutopia that he likes to mix-in short written assessments to check for understanding, even as short as a sentence or two. “When students decipher concepts simply and succinctly, they’re primed to contemplate what they read at a deeper level,” Barbour said. “Summarizing, for instance, obliges them to read the text several times, identify key concepts and main points, and decode complex passages.”

His insights line up with a body of research which finds that when students summarize what they’ve just read—in their own words, and without the help of a text at their side—it helps them better integrate new information into their existing knowledge base.

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Here's how to set your reading goals and read more books in 2024

Mansee Khurana

Even if you're someone who reads regularly, it can be hard to keep up your reading goals. Jackie Lay /NPR hide caption

Even if you're someone who reads regularly, it can be hard to keep up your reading goals.

Trying to read more can be a hard habit to stick to – even if you're someone who regularly reads a lot.

Just ask Nadia Odunayo, the founder and CEO of The StoryGraph, a book recommendation website with over a million users. Odunayo said that when she started The Storygraph in 2019, reading more felt like an essential goal.

"It felt like it very much became part of my identity as a reader, " Odunayo told Morning Edition . "Like, I run a books company, I need to make sure I'm reading."

In a few years, Odunayo went from reading 13 books a year to well over 70.

While she feels like that's a realistic goal for her, it's not an achievable goal for everybody.

Odunayo says setting realistic expectations about how many books you want to read can be the key to success. But making sure you pick the right a mount of books to read in a year can be tricky.

"It was a combination of making the time, but also being excited about a lot more books, " Odunayo said.

Why it's OK to judge a book by its cover (and more tips on how to find a great read)

A Economist/YouGov poll found that 46% of Americans finished zero books last year and 5% read just one last year. Out of the 1,500 American's surveyed in the poll, only 21% read more than ten books.

With March being National Reading Month – it is a good time to think about revisit your reading goals from the beginning of the year. Whether you've just gotten into reading, or you're churning through multiple books a week, here's some tips to keep in mind as you're setting your reading goals.

Expand your reading horizons by thinking about what types of books you're reading. Jackie Lay /NPR hide caption

Expand your reading horizons by thinking about what types of books you're reading.

Think genres, not numbers

Reading goals don't always have to be numerical. Goals such as wanting to read books from more diverse authors or reading more of a specific genre can be better than just focusing on a number. Brea Grant, one of the hosts of the podcast Reading Glasses , says she realized she didn't want to set a number goal when she found herself reading books she didn't like, or finishing books just for the sake of hitting a number.

"That's not fun because that's going to eventually turn you off from reading," Grant said.

Here are the Books We Love: 380+ great 2023 reads recommended by NPR

Sites like The StoryGraph features reading challenges that users can participate in to expand their reading habits. One challenge recommends books from 10 different countries for users who want to read from more diverse authors.

You can also create your own goals. If you're an avid fantasy romance reader, for example, you may want to see how many science fiction books you can incorporate into your reading habit.

Sometimes, it can be as simple as reading books on a topic you're interested in. Grant, a filmmaker, decided that this year that she wanted to read more books about filmmaking.

"I didn't go to film school, and I realized that I haven't even read that many books about filmmaking, even though I've been a filmmaker for so many years," Grant said. "So I think that focusing on reading more books about my craft is a better goal than a specific number of books."

Reading might seem like a solitary hobby, but it doesn't have to be! Jackie Lay /NPR hide caption

Reading might seem like a solitary hobby, but it doesn't have to be!

Find more ways to make reading a community affair

Reading can often seem like a solitary hobby, but it doesn't have to be.

Check your local area for book clubs and reading-related events. Or find someone to talk to about books – and you don't even have to ask about what they are currently reading. You can ask them about their favorite book, or the book that impacted their life the most.

"That's another way that people can show that they're bookish without necessarily being like 'I read 400 books this year'," Mallory O' Meara, who hosts the Reading Glasses podcast with Grant, said.

If you'd rather get lost in a book alone, O'Meara says you might enjoy finding new spots to read in your city. It might feel intimidating going into a coffee shop or bar alone, but it can be a fun way to explore your neighborhood while doing something you love.

How to start a book club: Tips and reading suggestions

"We really encourage people to make it an activity," Grant said. "Get a cozy blanket, get a cup of tea, something that you look forward to at the end of the day."

Whatever you prefer, Grant says it's always important to remember why you want to read more, and not get too caught up in feeling like you have to read a certain number of books.

"Reading is a hobby, and you want to get the maximum enjoyment out of it," Grant said.

Don't be afraid to adjust your goal

At the beginning of the year, it's easy to set high expectations of yourselves. You think you can workout everyday, or read a book every week. But as the year goes on, you might want to adjust that number to a goal you know you can reach.

"There's a lot of things we won't achieve in life," Grant said. "Make reading something you know you can get done."

Finding that perfect number can be hard.You want something that challenges you, but doesn't feel unrealistic. Additionally, life can get in the way. These challenges could include large work projects or family obligations that you didn't anticipate at the beginning of the year.

Pop Culture Happy Hour

How to get the most out of your library.

Suzanne Skyvara, who leads marketing at Goodreads, a book recommendation site where over six million users participate in its annual reading challenge, recommends adjusting your number later in the year if you need, and encourages not to think of changing your goal as "failing."

"If you're finding that you've set the goal too high in the middle of the year and it's becoming demotivating you can bring it down, which re-energizes me and gets me back on track," Skyvara said.

After all, reading should be a hobby, not homework.

"The goal should always be to enjoy your reading life more," O' Meara said. "To read more books that you either love or teach you something or you connect with in some way."

Correction March 28, 2024

This article was updated to fix the amount of Goodreads users particpating in the the site's annual reading challenge.

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Reading Strategies
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The Importance Of Reading Books Free Essay Example
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6 Effective Reading Strategies for Comprehension
10 lines essay on Importance of Reading/reading books essay in english/our knowledge
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Book Talking: Increasing Interest in Reading

COMMENTS

Academic Reading Strategies
Some purposes for reading might be. to scan for specific information; to skim to get an overview of the text; to relate new content to existing knowledge; to write something (often depends on a prompt) to critique an argument; to learn something; for general comprehension; Strategies. Strategies differ from reader to reader.
Active Reading Strategies: Remember and Analyze What You Read
Write a summary of an essay or chapter in your own words. Do this in less than a page. Capture the essential ideas and perhaps one or two key examples. This approach offers a great way to be sure that you know what the reading really says or is about. Write your own exam question based on the reading. Teach what you have learned to someone else!
5.2 Effective Reading Strategies
Determining Reading Speed and Pacing. To determine your reading speed, select a section of text—passages in a textbook or pages in a novel. Time yourself reading that material for exactly 5 minutes, and note how much reading you accomplished in those 5 minutes. Multiply the amount of reading you accomplished in 5 minutes by 12 to determine ...
The Effectiveness of Reading Strategies on Reading Comprehension
As regards metacognitive reading strategies, the majority of outstanding students use relatively common reading strategies: (1) identifying and considering reading topics, (2) setting reading ...
PDF SQ3R: Effective Reading
Step 2: Question. Why: Collecting questions you develop as you survey the reading will help you focus your reading on understanding the critical gaps in your knowledge. When: As you survey, jot down any questions about the content that occur to you. How: Look for things you don't understand in the title and headings to any subsections;
Improving Student Writing through Reading Strategies
Some training and practice with reading strategies is a valuable addition to the skills of any tutor, especially in the writing center. Writing tutors focus primarily on the process of developing an essay, but they can also demonstrate and encourage reading strategies on multiple levels: ... "Reading to Write." 50 Essays: A Portable ...
How to Improve Reading Comprehension: 8 Expert Tips
Tip 3: Re-read (or Skim) Previous Sections of the Text. For the most part, reading is a personal activity that happens entirely in your head. So don't feel you have to read just like anyone else if "typical" methods don't work for you. Sometimes it can make the most sense to read (or re-read) a text out of order.
Active Reading Strategies
One strategy you can use to become a more active, engaged reader is the SQ3R strategy, a step-by-step process to follow before, during, and after reading. You may already use some variation of it. In essence, the process works like this: Survey the text in advance. Form questions before you start reading. Read the text.
The Writing Center
This handout is adapted from Karen Rosenberg's article "Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources". Reading scholarly sources can be difficult. This handout provides strategies to help you read dense, lengthy academic articles efficiently and effectively. 1: Examine the article for its audience.
Reading Strategies Free Essay Example
5. 2. Some Techniques for Teaching During-Reading Strategies During reading, strategic readers: * Check understanding of the text by paraphrasing the author's words. * Monitor comprehension and use fix-up strategies: use the cueing systems to figure out unknown words and imaging, imagining, inferencing, and predicting.
Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers
To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one.
Karen Rosenberg's "Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly
Selected Essays on Writing Processes. ... Based on my experience as a frustrated student and now as a teacher of reading strategies, I have some insights to share with you designed to make the reading process more productive, more interesting, and more enjoyable" (Rosenberg, 2011, p. 211). Chicago Citation Examples.
Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension
Be aware of what they do understand. Identify what they do not understand. Use appropriate strategies to resolve problems in comprehension. 2. 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 ...
Strategies for Essay Writing
Tips for Reading an Assignment Prompt. Asking Analytical Questions. Thesis. Introductions. What Do Introductions Across the Disciplines Have in Common? Anatomy of a Body Paragraph. Transitions. Tips for Organizing Your Essay. Counterargument.
Reading Strategies Essays (Examples)
Reading Strategies. PAGES 2 WORDS 562. graduate experience thus far has exceeded my expectations. I was prepared to do a considerable amount of reading and feared that I might find too much of it to be overly theoretical and dry. I was surprised and pleased to find that much of the reading will apply directly to my work in the field of teaching.
PDF Strategies for Essay Writing
answer to that question will be your essay's thesis. You may have many questions as you consider a source or set of sources, but not all of your questions will form the basis of a strong essay. For example, your initial questions about a source may be answered by reading the source more closely. On the other hand,
reading strategies essay
Reading Strategies Paper. course a variety of different reading strategies that can help me read at a daily bases. The strategies in this course consist of five levels of thinking. The first level is to acquire information or knowledge. Second level is to understand and comprehended what you acquired. Third level apply the knowledge that you ...
3.3 Effective Reading Strategies
Determining Reading Speed and Pacing. To determine your reading speed, select a section of text—passages in a textbook or pages in a novel. Time yourself reading that material for exactly 5 minutes, and note how much reading you accomplished in those 5 minutes. Multiply the amount of reading you accomplished in 5 minutes by 12 to determine ...
Reading Comprehension Strategies And Reading Skills English Language Essay
Literature review 2.1. Reading comprehension strategies and reading skills. Oxford (1990) gives a detailed definition of language learning strategies: " Learning strategies are specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to new situations" (p.8) and described concretely how learning strategies ...
Effective Teaching of Reading in Education Essay
Effective teaching of reading is an important aspect as reading does not come as naturally as speaking. Children do not learn how to read just by being exposed to reading materials, but rather, for them to learn this important skill, they ought to be taught explicitly and systematically. We will write a custom essay on your topic.
Skills and Strategies for Research and Reading
Identify the characteristics of several forms of literature and college-level reading materials. 4. Differentiate between the types of resources provided through a library. 5. Evaluate relevancy and credibility of source of information. 6. Identify strategies to promote effective research and reading.
Reading Comprehension and Teaching Strategies Essay
Teachers should pay more attention to developing efficient teaching strategies that would foster the acquisition of those skills by children. With regard, the metacognition, graphic organizers, and recognizing the structure of the texts and stories should be among the most effective strategies enhancing reading comprehension. We will write a ...
17 Fun Ways To Teach Reading Comprehension Strategies
17 strategies for reading comprehension (and how to make them fun to learn) Explore reading comprehension strategies you can teach your students and how you can take them from skill-and-drill memorization to fun, interactive experiences: 1. Using metacognition. Metacognition is a concept that means "thinking about thinking.".
Reading Mastery: Strategies Unveiled
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Tools to Boost Students' Reading Stamina
A new survey by Ed Week found that more than half of teachers in grades 3-8 report their students' reading stamina has "declined precipitously" in recent years. The findings line up with a 2014 meta-analysis, which concluded that for many U.S. students, the stamina required to sustain their attention during independent reading and "interact with texts in a meaningful manner" is waning.
Here's how you can read more books, according to experts : NPR
Find more ways to make reading a community affair . Reading can often seem like a solitary hobby, but it doesn't have to be. Check your local area for book clubs and reading-related events. Or ...
Importance of Reading Essay
1. Empathy towards others 2. Acquisition of qualities like kindness, courtesy. 500+ Words Essay on Importance of Reading is provided here to help students learn how to write an effective essay on this topic. They must go through this essay in-depth and then try to write their own essay.
Catch-Up Friday: Improving the Reading Proficiency Levels and
Reading proficiency extends beyond mere word comprehension; it demands active engagement with text, analysis of its content, and synthesis of information to generate new insights and perspectives. This study aimed to investigate the reading proficiency levels of Grade 10 students during the implementation of Catch-Up Friday at Prosperidad National High School in the 2023-2024 school year and ...
Stress index strategy enhanced with financial news sentiment analysis
This paper introduces a new risk-on risk-off strategy for the stock market, which combines a financial stress indicator with a sentiment analysis done by ChatGPT reading and interpreting Bloomberg daily market summaries. Forecasts of market stress derived from volatility and credit spreads are enhanced when combined with the financial news sentiment derived from GPT-4.