Today we're going to spend some time talking about critical reading.
My name is Kerry Hancock, a Ph.D. candidate here at UK, working in Curriculum and Instruction
with an emphasis in literacy.
I've taught high school English, Drama, and Public Speaking for several years, and I'm
excited to be back at school pursuing a dissertation focusing on online reading strategies.
We'll talk about reading strategies throughout the reading process, which includes before,
during, and after reading.
One thing that many of my students originally thought is that all reading is equal, but
it's not.
To be honest, I really wish that I had known about the different types of reading.
First, there is functional reading.
Functional reading is the reading that you need to do to function in life, such as reading
signs, or directions, or recipes.
Understanding cultural or universal symbols is also considered functional reading.
Workplace reading is anything that you need to do for your job, such as reading manuals,
memos, or correspondence from clients or colleagues.
Pleasure reading is any reading that you do for fun.
It might be books, magazines, online reading.
It's really any reading that you choose to do.
And that leaves academic reading, which is the reading you do for school and the focus
of this presentation.
While the strategies can apply to any type of reading, we really encourage you to consider
using them for your academic reading.
Before reading strategies include previewing the text, which basically means looking at
how many pages you need to read, the size of the font, the title, skim a paragraph and
see if there are words that you don't know.
Look at the features of the text to see what you know about it.
Are there headings, or diagrams, or pictures, charts, is the book in chapters, is it more
of an article, and finally how is it organized?
Is it structured like a play, does it set up an argument, or is it a research report?
Does it compare things?
Can you fit the structure into a particular genre?
Previewing the text will help you see what you are up against before you actually start
reading.
The next step before you actually read is to set a purpose for reading.
The reason I say that it needs to be more than because I have to, is because the more
you can connect with the reading, the easier it will be.
You need to personalize your purpose to fit the reading task.
For example, I'm reading this because I need to write a paper, or maybe you need to contribute
to a discussion, or maybe I need study notes to take a test.
At any rate, setting a purpose will help you determine how intensely you need to read the
text.
The final step of the before reading stage is to develop a plan.
You need to be realistic when you set aside time to complete a reading task.
For example, if there are a lot of words that you don't know then the text will take you
longer to read.
Developing a plan will help you feel successful in your reading.
It's not good to just say, 'Oh well, I have a ten page article to read, so I'll just set
aside 20 minutes', especially if you know that the content is new to you or the vocabulary
is challenging, because setting aside such a short amount of time is setting yourself
up for failure.
So what should you do during reading?
To truly excel in academic reading, we constantly monitor and revise our strategy use.
Some of the major academic strategies are highlighted here: asking questions, annotating,
interior monologue, and fix it up strategies, or what to do when comprehension breaks down.
Keep in mind that we don't do these things in isolation and we may not just do one strategy
at a time.
What I'd like to do now is show you a little bit of a clip of me conducting some reading
using some of these strategies.
So, metacognition is thinking about thinking.
So, what am I actually doing?
What is going on in my head when I read?
And sometimes that involves, I'm making notes, and I'm making content notes about
what the thing is about, and I'm reacting to what it's about.
I might be asking questions, I might be connecting to previous things that I've read.
So, I am just going to take a text, and I'm going to read a little bit of it and use some
symbols and some strategies by showing you what's going on in my head as I read.
So this article, The benefits of Facebook "friends:" social capital, okay so social
capital is something I'm going to talk about.
I might even ask myself, what is this exactly?
Okay, so what do we mean by social capital?
Okay, so as I preview this article, I notice that there is an abstract, and then we get
into the introduction, if I move down a little bit more, okay we're going to talk about
Facebook, here's a literature review, um, and this is what other people have said, and
other studies that have been done.
And then if I scroll down a little bit more, okay we've seen maintain social capital.
Okay, here's a methods section, so this is actually, this is a study.
Okay and they have a method, and then there's charts and so on.
Okay, so what I'm doing right now, is I'm just giving myself a sense of how long is
this article, going back to those beginning strategies: how long might it take me to read
it?
Okay, so for the sake of your eyes, I won't go through all of this, but I know it's
a fairly lengthy article.
Alright, so let's start reading.
Okay, the abstract is going to give me a very concise view of what this is about.
So, this study examines the relationship between the use of Facebook, a popular online, so
this is going to be a relationship between the use of Facebook, a popular online social
network site and the formation and maintenance of social capital, and we've talked about
social capital.
So again, we're trying to figure out, what does that mean?
In addition to assessing bonding and bridging social capital, so we're going to look at,
what are the, what do these terms mean, so I'm not sure yet.
We explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one's ability to stay connected
with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital.
Okay, so previously inhabited community they refer to as maintained social capital.
Okay, regression analysis, okay so this is a way of looking at data, conducted on the
results of a survey from undergraduate students.
Okay, so n is their sample…to suggest a strong association between use of Facebook
and three types of social capital, with the strongest relationship being to bridging social
capital.
In addition, Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well-being,
okay so we're going to be talking about psychological well-being, suggesting that
it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self-esteem and low life
satisfaction.
So I guess what I'm wondering in this, because this seems like an older study, is I'm wondering
if people do have social capital that remain online only.
Um, or are we expecting that the direction of our online relationships will move to an
offline relationship.
Okay, so main directionality may not apply to today's SNSs, as they are structured
to both articulate existing connections and enable the creation of new ones.
But there's little research on this.
Okay, so what we're saying her is that the social capital implications of these services
is unknown.
So what so they actually do for people?
Okay, so this is an overview of Facebook.
I'm more concerned about the literature review right now, okay so social capital broadly
refers to, okay, so here's my definition.
That's what I was looking for.
Broadly refers to the resources accumulated through the relationships among people.
It's an elastic term, with a variety of definitions, conceived of as both a cause
and an effect, and so it is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue
to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized
relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.
Okay so what does this mean?
Okay, so I'm going to kind of think about this.
So, every person that I meet, real or online, they may have interests that go along with
mine, we may have things in common, we may have things that we use that are mutually
beneficial.
Maybe someone could help you find a job or maybe someone could help you find a book club,
or maybe someone can tell you where to get a babysitter, or the best restaurant to go
to, and all of that then becomes our social capital.
And so the suggestion here, at least as I'm understanding it right now is, there are more
ways to develop that social capital online, and I guess I'm wondering how authentic
that development is and if that development actually does serve us well, and I think that's
part of what they're going to talk about here because they mention that the study has
something to do with self-esteem or and lack thereof and self-concept and we can see that
if we go back to the abstract.
So what the abstract does here is the abstract shows us, kind of takes us through very briefly
what the whole study will be about and then we go through the parts of the article to
kind of see those things and be able to check them off.
Okay let's leave the article for a second, well we're going to leave it now, and let's
talk about, um, what we did.
So we annotated, we paraphrased, we made connections, we worked through some terms that we weren't
really sure about and I did all of that out loud.
You certainly won't need to do all of that out loud all of the time, but there should
be things going on in your head to make those connections as you read.
After reading it's important to take stock of what you know.
Can you explain the passage, can you pick out main points?
Can you summarize?
Can you recognize parts that you don't know well and do you have a plan to address confusion?
There are some other potential challenges with your academic reading that I'd like to
address: sometimes a course requires and online textbook, you will read lots of articles or
research reports, managing your time can be difficult, and finally sometimes, you just
don't know what you don't know.
Let's deal with each of these as a separate issue.
Online textbooks and other platforms are improving, but many are still clunky and the publishing
companies tend to control the available tools.
Some allow you to annotate or keep a running record of notes and some don't.
Some are very interactive platforms and include quizzes to check comprehension and vocabulary
links for new words, and hyperlinks for studies, videos or other information to aid with comprehension,
and some don't.
Some platforms have disabled the print function and others allow you to print content.
It just depends, because there is not standard for online texts.
So, what you can do as a reader is be prepared to adapt your strategies to the environment.
If you can't annotate, you may need to concentrate on taking better notes.
You might need to set up your notes to include triggers that will help you recall information,
such as reaction notes in addition to content notes.
Sometimes it is difficult for us to make sense of the articles that we have to read for class.
Most of these articles come from research studies conducted within our discipline or
major.
The scholarly articles tell us what the experts in the field know.
Generally research articles have the following parts: an introduction, a methods section,
results, and then a discussion of the results.
The introduction, along with the abstract, will give you a general sense of the study
and the research question.
What is being explored?
Often what follows is a review of literature which places the research question in relation
to other studies that have been done on the topic.
The methods section lays out how this particular study was done, including how participants
were selected and the type of study that the research is, for example, is this a qualitative
or a quantitative study?
The results section provides some analysis of data and how conclusions were drawn.
The discussion section may return to the literature but it also talks about the data in relation
to the overall research question or problem.
There may also be a section on limitations of the study or what new research needs to
be added to the field.
Keep in mind as you read scholarly articles that you want to be aware of prevalence: what
is the problem, and how often does it occur?
Relevance: why should our discipline care about what is being studies in this article?
and Precedence: Who has studied this topic (or related) before, and what did they find?
And keep in mind that's why there is for example, a review of literature in these articles,
so think about PRP.
Other challenges include time management: this is a big one.
Sometimes we forget to think of reading as homework when we first begin a degree.
If we don't preview well and we don't set aside appropriate time to read the text at
hand, we may quickly get behind.
Remember that your reading must be an active process and you must treat it like all of
your other homework as set aside appropriate amounts of time to get it done.
Think about the reading task and the purpose to help you set aside time.
Those before reading strategies are important here.
Vocabulary or a lack of background knowledge can also prove to be an issue.
If you know nothing about a topic, you may need to build in time to watch a video, read
something easier to give you some background, I call this read around, or maybe you will
need to make time to ask someone.
It's important to consider these challenges at the start of the week so that you can allow
time to address them without getting behind in your work.
For many of us academic reading is not always fun, it is an important part of obtaining
a degree, so I would encourage you all to stay positive and to know that reading is
not an easy task, and you will continue to develop strategies throughout your lifetime.
Every reader hits clunks along the way, but if you slow down, or re-read, or ask a question,
or think through what's going on in your head, you will eventually develop strategies for
the reading to click.
Be patient and try to see reading well as a lifelong pursuit.
There is no magic wand, but we do have plenty
No comments:
Post a Comment