As a student, but also in the rest of your life, you will read a lot to gain new knowledge and skills, to be able to develop good solutions and to stay up-to-date with recent developments. ICT is a fast changing field! You are going to read a lot of emails, forums, blogs, professional literature, books and scientific articles in your life, both professionally and personally. The amount of information available is growing every day!
You only know whether the text you have found is of importance to you after you have looked at it. But looking is not the same as reading. If you are going to read everything you find, you will spend a lot of time on texts that you are not going to use at all. A good reading strategy can make this process a lot more efficient.
In this HBO-IT building block for Research in Education, you will learn a suitable reading strategy consisting of five steps: predict, skim, scan, understand and review. With this, you have the skills to spend no more time on a piece of text than absolutely necessary and still get what you need out of it.
If you have any comments or questions about this building block, please contact Danny Plass (Saxion). Translation into English by Jenny Oude Bos.
Learning goals
At the end of this building block:
You can make predictions to anticipate quickly whether a text is useful for you to read, and if so which parts
You can skim a text which allows you to extract the most important general ideas from a text
You can scan a text to search for specific information
You can use reading comprehension techniques to help better understand the information
You can use review techniques to better remember information within a text.
The DOT framework categorizes research into three knowledge domains and five research strategies (or: research rooms). Most textual information comes to us from the knowledge domain Available work (right side of the DOT framework), to ensure that we use the expertise that is already available on the topics we are working on. In the Library strategy, this knowledge is used to gain an overview and and Showroom research can be used to evaluate our solution.
Step 0. Purpose (your reading goal)
What do you want to know?
If you want to know how a certain device works, you look for different information than if you want to determine whether you want to buy the device. For the reading strategies that follow, you must first have a clear goal.
Formulate your reading goal:
As a question to answer - this way you know when you have reached your goal
In a few keywords - to keep in mind during Predict & Scan
Step 1. Predicting
Does the text contain the information you are looking for?
The purpose of this first reading phase is to determine whether you are going to spend more time on this text or not. You do this by looking at specific characteristics of the text and thus predict what the text is about without actually reading it. You try to form a picture of the content of the text and check whether it matches your reading goal. What is the overall content of the text and does it contain information that may match your purpose? You can usually determine this quite well on the basis of the characteristics and structure of a text, without reading the content!
Look at:
Title and any subtitle
The author and the company the person works for - does this person know anything about this topic? (CRAAP: authority)
Publication date - is this information up-to-date (enough)? (CRAAP: currency)
The journal or website where this text is available (CRAAP: authority)
The table of contents, chapter titles and sub-titles - what information is in the text and how is it structured?
Pictures, tables, and graphs with their titles - often give an indication of the information in the text
Use the find command (ctrl-f) or for books the index at the end of the book - are the terms you are looking for used in the text?
Not sure yet? Then dive deeper into the text with skimming to get an impression of the most important ideas in the text.
Step 2. Skimming
What are the main ideas of the text?
If you, after predicting, decide that this text is useful in relation to your reading goal, you can move on to the next step: skimming. Just like a farmer scoops the rich cream off the milk, here you try to extract (skim) the main ideas from the text without reading the text from start to finish (linearly). With skimming you look more in-depth at the text than during predicting.
You can use skimming if you are short on time, when you just need to understand the general idea and not the details, or to get a little deeper understanding of the global text after predicting so that you can better understand the details of the text later.
As you skim, keep in mind the 2-3 terms you have come up with for your reading goal.
Read:
The abstract or summary of an article, or the back of a book.
The introduction - a good introduction explains what is in the text.
The conclusion - this usually summarizes the most important points.
The last paragraph of each chapter.
The first and last sentences of each paragraph.
Texts that stand out because of their design such as lists, texts in bold or italics and texts in separate frames (unless they are just examples).
Marking
If you come across a part of a text with valuable information, you can mark them to read "for real" later. Do not linger too long in the skimming phase. A number of marking ideas that you can apply on paper or, for example, in a PDF (learn the shortcuts!):
put a dot in the margin next to the interesting part of the text
highlight interesting parts of a text with a highlighter
underline or put a circle around important words, e.g. that are repeated often, are in the title or are italicized
also mark words that you do not know to look up the meaning of later
Step 3. Scanning
Where is the answer?
With predicting you have a global understanding of the text and you have determined that it may contain the information you are looking for. You have skimmed the text and already have a good overview of the global ideas in the text.
With the help of scanning you can now search for information on a specific topic. You are no longer interested in the broader picture, but are looking for a concrete answer. You know what you are looking for.
Search:
Start from your keywords about the information you are looking for and keep these words in mind as you scan. After skimming, you may already know which terms the text uses for this.
Use the find command to search for the terms on websites, in e-books or in PDFs. Press ctrl-f or cmd-f, type in the term and press enter. For a book: use the index at the end of the book.
Start with the sections of the text where you expect to find the information you need based on the predicting and skimming steps. Review the first and last paragraphs of that section for confirmation.
When you have found the information, it is time to really read it.
Step 4. Understanding
What is the answer?
By scanning you have determined which parts of the text are important to you and you will read those parts linearly, from start to finish.
Mark interesting parts of a text, underline definitions, put an exclamation mark for important text, a question mark for what you still want to find out.
Look up the meaning of unknown words. This will help you gain a better understanding of the text. Moreover: the more words you know, the faster you can work through new texts.
Answer your previously formulated question (your reading goal) briefly. How would you explain it to someone else?
Create a mind map as a summary to capture the aspects, traits and relationships.
Step 5. Review strategies
Sometimes you not only want to extract the most important information from texts, but you also want to remember the information. You can do this by using the following review strategies:
Think of 5 questions about the text and answer them.
Schedule review moments to take another look at your summary / mind map / highlighted text, a day later, a week later, and a month later.
The strategies of summarizing and mind mapping for reading comprehension (previous step) are also helpful here.
Practical tips
Create a quiet environment in which you can concentrate well.
Only skip steps if you already know the answer to that step. Predicting prepares you for skimming through priming, skimming improves your comprehension of the text which prepares you for scanning.
Know yourself. Do you get more information from pictures or are you more linguistic? Do you prefer to read in the morning or in the evening? How long can you concentrate? Adjust your strategy to your own preference.
Bonus tips:
Read daily. The more you read, the more words you know and the more practiced you become in using the different strategies.
Also use the reading strategies for exams. First, briefly skim the exam as a whole to determine what gives you the most points and which questions you think are easiest. Read the question first, so that you can read the text in a targeted manner.
Assignments
Self-assessment
With the exercise below you can easily test whether you have understood the theoretical content of this building block.
1.1 Curiosity workshop
During the workshop you will practice with the different techniques and with a before and after measurement you will see how much faster you can go through texts now that you are working more purposefully.
Throughout the project as a whole, you will use the techniques to effectively work through the texts you have found that may contain relevant information.
Bibliography
Ceriez, M. (2008). Snellezen. Uitgeverij Thema.
Hageraats, E. (2017). Leesstrategie. HBO-ICT, Saxion.
James, R. (2019) Speed reading - How to Read a Book a Day - Simple Tricks to Explode Your Reading Speed and Comprehension. Publish Drive.
Sutz, R. (2009). Speed reading for dummies. John Wiley & Sons.
For the teacher
In deze sectie kun je zowel een moduleverantwoordelijke als uitvoerend docent extra informatie en tips geven, zodat zij snel kunnen inschatten of en hoe zij deze bouwsteen in hun module of les in zouden kunnen passen.
Het doel van deze bouwsteen
context en doel van deze bouwsteen, ook vanuit het curriculum gezien.
Plaats in het curriculum en module
Wat is het gewenste studentniveau (bijv. leerjaar)? Wat is vereiste danwel gewenste voorkennis? Wat zouden nuttige vervolgtopics zijn?
Idealiter is het materiaal flexibel, zodat het in verschillende contexten goed ingepast kan worden.
Voorbeeld lesplan
Geef (minimaal) een voorbeeld lesplan van een mogelijke uitvoering inclusief tijdsindicatie per lesonderdeel, zodat een docent snel kan inschatten of en hoe het is in te passen in de beschikbare tijd. Het advies is het passend te houden binnen 1 of 2 lesuren.
Denk bijvoorbeeld aan een lesplan dat uitgaat van zoveel mogelijk individuele voorbereiding door de student vooraf of juist een lesplan dat uitgaat van geen voorbereiding door de student.
Tips bij de opdrachten
Bij elke gedefinieerde opdracht kun je kort docenttips geven voor bijvoorbeeld de voorbereiding, uitvoering en begeleiding.
Tips voor projectbegeleiding
Deze tips zijn algemener van aard om studenten te begeleiden op deze leerdoelen in een project. Wat voor vragen kan de docent bijvoorbeeld stellen om de studenten te stimuleren over deze aspecten na te denken?
Beoordelen
Hoe kunnen de opdrachten beoordeeld worden? Dit kan heel specifiek zijn of algemener in de vorm van rubrics. Een beoordeling moet snel kunnen worden uitgevoerd.
Het arrangement 1.1.4 Goal-oriented reading is gemaakt met
Wikiwijs van
Kennisnet. Wikiwijs is hét onderwijsplatform waar je leermiddelen zoekt,
maakt en deelt.
Dit lesmateriaal is gepubliceerd onder de Creative Commons Naamsvermelding 4.0 Internationale licentie. Dit houdt in dat je onder de voorwaarde van naamsvermelding vrij bent om:
het werk te delen - te kopiëren, te verspreiden en door te geven via elk medium of bestandsformaat
het werk te bewerken - te remixen, te veranderen en afgeleide werken te maken
voor alle doeleinden, inclusief commerciële doeleinden.
Van dit lesmateriaal is de volgende aanvullende informatie beschikbaar:
Toelichting
Als student, maar ook in de rest van je leven, zul je veel lezen om nieuwe kennis en vaardigheden op te doen, zodat je de nodige informatie kunt opdoen om goede oplossingen te ontwikkelen en up-to-date blijft met recente ontwikkelingen. ICT is een erg snelveranderend vakgebied. In deze HBO-ICT bouwsteen voor Onderzoek in Onderwijs leer je de basisleesstrategieen voor doelgericht lezen (scannend en begrijpend lezen).
Als student, maar ook in de rest van je leven, zul je veel lezen om nieuwe kennis en vaardigheden op te doen, zodat je de nodige informatie kunt opdoen om goede oplossingen te ontwikkelen en up-to-date blijft met recente ontwikkelingen. ICT is een erg snelveranderend vakgebied. In deze HBO-ICT bouwsteen voor Onderzoek in Onderwijs leer je de basisleesstrategieen voor doelgericht lezen (scannend en begrijpend lezen).
