DOUGLAS COLLEGE
@ JOB OPPORTUNITIES (cont'd.) ARCHIVES

 

 

W.M. Douglass, Office of the President,
Oregon Institute of Technology,

Klamath Falls,

ORE.

97601, ;

ph. (503) 882-6321, ext. 442

READING TEXTBOOKS

When you assign a chapter to be read in a textbook, you unboubtedly
have mentally highlighted certain parts of that chapter as being essential
and discarded others as being worth little attention. You also see the
importance of that chapter in relation to the rest of the course, how it
fits in with the information you've previously covered and what you want
to lead into.

The student though, without your sharpened powers of discrimination,
sees the chapter as 30 pages, 15,000 words, every word of which is equally
important. So he begins to read the chapter by starting at the first word
and reading every word until he can't stand it and falls asleep or puts it
off, still not blaming his method but the difficulty of the material.

He still doesn't have any sense of the whole, of the structure, of the

@ number of important points the author is trying to make (and there is a
limited number.) His careful reading has been wasted because he doesn't
know what he's reading to find out.

He has to start trying to understand the broad, general concepts and —
then go back to whatever essential details need to be committed to memory.
Teachers in study skills classes have a hard time convincing students
there is some other way to read than to start at the first word and read
every word. But the student is willing to confess that method doesn't
work! So perhaps, you, as a content area teacher can deal in your classes
to a small extent with the process of assimilating knowledge as well as
the knowledge itself.

The student needs to know that not even you learned everything in
in that text on your first exposure to the material. So he needs to
plan to look at the material more than once. That doesn't mean he should
read it slowly and carefully three times. He wouldn't do it. But if
he looked at it 3 times, each a third as long as it would have taken him
to read it once entirely through, he will know it better. The first
time through should be a preview of all the material assigned. Having
seen the end, where the author is heading, will give him a reason why
the intermediate steps are necessary. And having noticed that some
ideas are repeated many times while others only once will give him the
clues he needs to read selectively.

Articles on previewing and other reading skills are available through
the Reading and Study Skills faculty.

& ....-Al Atkinson, Sherry Ladbrook,
Sandra Carpenter