As a memory researcher I was obviously interested in what reading strategies would leverage encoding to improve reading comprehension. My main area of expertise is in human learning and memory which does occasionally brush up with research on reading comprehension, but they tend to be separate fields. So I was excited to see some very familiar terms and strategies in this section.

The two main strategies that Lei and colleagues recommend here are outlining and concept mapping. Both really achieve the same purpose which is to help students organize and elaborate on their understanding of the material. They note that “the use of an outline presents the visual organization of a textbook that function to prepare readers for identification of major topics and relevant information within the text … The outline serves as a guide for facilitating information retrieval by providing specific cues that are applied during the learning experience” (pg 38). The authors recommend providing skeletons of outlines that students fill out with notes and other information to connect the outline to the text (5). 

Similar to outlines, concept maps also provide a visual organization of information. Based on the authors’ description of concept mapping, the benefit to reading comprehension seems to come from the process of creating the concept map – identifying the concepts, the links among concepts, and the hierarchy of concepts – rather than the concept map itself per se. In other words, to receive a benefit of concept mapping students need to create the concept map and not just be given the concept map. The authors also note that some students need instruction and practice with concept mapping before getting a benefit from them. Their discussion of concept mapping seems similar to what Megan has discussed with retrieval mapping. 

How I Plan to Implement These Strategies

In thinking about how to use these encoding strategies in my upper-level course I’ve settled on including outlining as an additional learning opportunity. In the “ungrading” approach I’m using, students will have to create Learning Portfolios throughout the semester to demonstrate their learning. There are a few required elements to the Learning Portfolio – indicating that they have read or watched all of the assigned material and submitting all required papers – but there are optional, additional learning opportunities that they may include in their portfolio to make the case for a higher grade. Creating detailed outlines are a great way to improve their reading comprehension and to demonstrate how they have worked to improve their understanding of course material.

Reading flexibility was the shortest section in Lei et al.’s review paper, but I found it to be the most interesting strategy. Lei and colleagues stress that “Students must learn to adjust their speed and style of reading to their reading objectives and the type of materials to be read… Some reading materials can be scanned, skimmed through, and read lightly, while others must [be] read closely and critically” (pg 40). 

Students are often shocked when I tell them NOT to read something closely. While I appreciate the default assumption that everything assigned is important and therefore deserves close and critical reading, it’s simply not practical nor is it reflective of how experts in the area read. In searching for articles on reading strategies I did not read the entirety of every article I encountered in order to determine if it was useful to me. Instead, there are several decision points I used to decide whether an article was useful for my purposes and whether I should continue to read it. Many were rejected on the basis of the title alone. If the article had a title that seemed like what I was looking for then I read the abstract. Again more were rejected at that stage. If the title and abstract looked good then I skimmed the article – generally reading a few paragraphs in the introduction to see if the background information and questions explored would line up with my interests, then skimming the methods to see which population was studied (I’m an instructor at an American University teaching young adults whose first language is primarily English), and finally jumping ahead to the conclusion to review the main takeaways. Only after doing that with several articles did I read an article critically – i.e. highlighting key points, noting connections in the margins and even looking up some of the cited papers. 

How I Plan to Implement These Strategies

From talking with my students this does not seem to be the approach they use. They sit down to read papers from start to finish, taking away what they can never to return again. The idea that you can read at different levels for different goals is somewhat novel. I plan to discuss reading flexibility with my students several times throughout the course. First, I’ll need to introduce the idea of skim vs critical reading noting that there are specific strategies to skim reading academic articles. Next, we’ll need to talk about skim reading as the first step in critical reading. Getting the big picture of a text to help guide you through a subsequent closer read. This seems like a natural point to start building an outline of a paper if students choose to do that as an additional learning activity. Finally, the notes and highlights you make while reading will depend on what you are trying to understand from the paper. For every reading I’ve included 2 or 3 guiding questions to help students read the papers more critically. 

Taken together, I found the strategies recommended by Lei et al. (2010) very helpful in preparing for my course this semester. I hope that providing some examples and discussion of my own course design process is helpful to others who are going through the same process as the fall semester is about to start.