Contents introduction chapter I: Strategies to make students read purposefully

Purposeful Reading¹. Reading for Class vs. reading for Leisure.
Usually use surface-level reading, or getting the “gist” of the text when reading things like news articles or novels in our down time. Need close reading for class-assigned texts because ideas, themes, and context of readings relate to ideas of the class. Close reading is characterized by:
1. Looking for the author’s purpose in writing the piece and the main intended audience of author.
2. Looking for the main ideas, organization, and style of the piece
3. Understanding why the professor assigned the piece and how it connects
to something learned in class
4. Understanding the historical/cultural background of author and how it’s
different from your own perspective
5. Objectively determining if there are debatable points in the piece
Strategies for habitual close reading:
Annotating. A way to “talk back” to the author as you read, is most effective if you have a system rather than just random underlines:
1. Mark the thesis, main points, and important ideas of the piece
2. Mark key terms and unfamiliar words—look them up!
3. Write your questions and/or comments in the margins of the piece
4. Write any personal experience related to the piece
5. Mark confusing parts or sections that warrant a reread
6. Underline the sources, if any, the author used
Focus Your Brain
Now that you have an idea what the passage is about, your brain will be ready to receive the information you are going to read. When you know what ideas to expect, you focus on those ideas. If there was information you did not understand when you skimmed, you will likely focus on it when you read. If there were questions you thought about, you will focus on answering them. If there were graphs about a certain point, you already know that information is probably important, so you will read it attentively.
Adapt Your Strategy
You do not read different types of materials the same way. For example, if you read a novel, you focus on characters, themes, the plot, the meaning of symbols and allegories, and so on. If you read a text book chapter explaining the steps in a process, you take notes on each step, underline important explanations, and so on.
If you know something about the passage you are about to read, you adjust your strategy to suit the type of passage. If it is a novel, you will focus on the literary elements and the story; if it is a text book chapter, you will probably get out your highlighter and a piece of paper to take notes on.
One measure of reading individual differences that is predictive of a variety
of reading comprehension skills is the working-memory capacity of the reader. ²To provide a conceptual definition, one’s working-memory capacity is related to how efficiently cognitive resources are allocated to processing relevant information during complex tasks such as reading. As it relates to reading specifically, individual differences in working-memory capacity influence how accurately readers comprehend text, generate inferences, determine relevant themes, and retain what is read. It should be noted that these differences in working-memory capacity are not necessarily indicative of a learning disability but refer to college-level readers at the lower end of reading comprehension performance. As working-memory capacity relates to reading for different purposes, in two separate investigations, low and high working-memory capacity readers were asked to imagine that they were either reading for entertainment or for study purposes as they read scientific, expository texts. In terms of strategies and processes used during verbal protocols, low and high working-memory capacity readers, like the results reported earlier tended to free associate and make evaluative comments more when reading for entertainment than when reading for study purposes. That is, low and high working-memory capacity readers used similar cognitive processing strategies when reading for entertainment. Not surprisingly low and high working-memory capacity readers’ level of recall was also similar in this reading purpose condition. Differences appeared, however, when reading for study purposes: low working-memory capacity readers paraphrased and made coherence-building inferences more often when reading for study, similar to the results reported earlier, but also emphasized a re-reading strategy and de-emphasized a comprehension monitoring strategy. High working-memory capacity readers also paraphrased and made coherence-building inferences more often when reading for study purposes but, in contrast to low working-memory capacity readers, emphasized a comprehension monitoring strategy and de-emphasized a re-reading strategy. The different strategies used when reading for study purposes also yielded differences in recall: low working-memory capacity readers recalled significantly less than high working-memory capacity readers.

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