READING BRIEFS: Reading Information for Faculty Across the Curriculum

• Reading Brief #1: An Introduction to the Project
• Reading Brief #2: How Well Do RVCC Students Read
• Reading Brief #3: How Well Do Your Students Read
• Reading Brief #4: How We Read Part I - Reading from the Bottom Up
• Reading Brief #5: How We Read Part II - Reading from the Top Down
• Reading Brief #6: Helping Students Read Better, Reading Strategies that Don't (Always) Work
• Reading Brief #7: Reading Strategies That Work - Writing Summaries
• Reading Brief #8: Reading Strategies That Work - Visual Organizers
• Reading Brief #9: Reading Strategies That Work - Asking Questions
• Reading Brief #10: Reading Strategies That Work - Reciprocal Reading
• Reading Brief #11: Reading the Page vs. Reading the Screen
• Reading Brief #12: Reading the Page vs. Reading the Screen-Gains & Losses

9/12/2002
Reading Brief #1: An Introduction to the Project
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

These Reading Briefs will be weekly postings this semester to the faculty about reading, helping students read better, and reading the page compared to reading the computer screen. The Reading Briefs project has been made possible by a much-appreciated fellowship from the College's Center for the Advancement of Innovative Teaching and Learning (CAITL).

Reading is obviously a key skill in any college course and yet professors are generally unfamiliar with the basic dynamics of how readers read, what factors determine reading comprehension levels, and how to help students become more effective readers. The purpose of these Reading Briefs will be to supply some useful information and thus to raise awareness of a teaching/learning component that we often take for granted. After all, the teaching of reading skills is associated with elementary education, when children "learn to read"; after that, students of all ages are supposed to "read to learn." But in fact differences in reading ability increase over the course of education: A much wider gap separates the capable from the weak readers at the college level than at the elementary level. At public community colleges, about one out of five entering students takes a developmental reading course.
During the semester I welcome comments and questions about the Reading Briefs. In a few weeks the Reading Briefs will turn to specific suggestions for helping students read more effectively, and I will be happy to meet with individual faculty to talk about ways to apply those general suggestions to your particular course. Later in the academic year, you will all be invited to a Faculty Development Workshop on reading.

Next week: How Well Do RVCC Students Read?

9/18/2002
Reading Brief #2: How Well Do RVCC Students Read
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

How well do RVCC students read? We have an approximate idea from the results of the Compass reading test taken by all students in degree and certificate programs. The brief answer is that there is a very wide range.
About 1% of our students read at or below the 8th grade level.
About 5% read between the 8th and 10th grade levels.
About 15% read between the 10th and 12th grade levels.
About 30% read between the 12th and 14th grade levels.
Nearly half read above the 14th grade levels.
Our students' scores are better than the scores for all two-year college students taking the test. RVCC has significantly fewer students reading at low levels and significantly more reading at high levels than two-year colleges generally. The percentages for all two-year college students taking the test are, for the same categories above, 3%, 9%, 23%, 30%, and 35%.

According to RVCC's policy on basic skills testing and placement, students whose Compass score denotes a reading proficiency at about the 11th grade level or below are required to take Foundations of Reading I, the first non-credit developmental reading course. Students with tallies placing them between approximately 11th and 13th grade reading levels are obligated to attend Foundations of Reading II, a course which, if completed satisfactorily, completes the developmental reading sequence.

What do these grade levels mean? I've written different parts of this Reading Brief at different grade levels. I've followed common formulas that are based on the length and difficulty of the words and sentences. The first paragraph about the Compass test scores is written at about an 11th grade level. Time and Newsweek magazines are also written at that level. The paragraph before this one is written at a college level, which is about the level of The New York Times. And this paragraph is written at about the level of Sports Illustrated and Reader's Digest, which is the 9th grade level.

Next Week: How Well Do YOUR Students Read?

Sources:

• ACT Compass/ESL Program: Entering Student Descriptive Report. Fall 2001.
• Flesch, Rudolph. How to Write Plain English. http://www.mang.canterbury.ac.nz.courseinfo/AcademicWriting/Flesch.htm , 8/19/02.
• Miles, Thomas H. Critical Thinking and Writing for Science and Technology. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990, 280-284. http://www.as.wvu.edu/~tmiles/fog.htm, 8/19/02.

9/26/2002
Reading Brief #3: How Well Do your Students Read?
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

We tend to underestimate the range of reading abilities in our classrooms. We give the same reading assignment to all 20, 30 or 40 students in a class and often we aren't aware of who the weakest readers are until it is late in the semester.

One reason is that weak readers become skilled at covering up their difficulty. The inability to read adequately is a powerful embarrassment. In a restaurant, a non-literate customer may hold a menu even though he can't read it while he checks out the food on other tables to decide what to order. In college, students who have difficulty reading can survive in a course by taking notes, getting help from friends, and reading–even underlining–the textbook without understanding it.
Here are some ways to get a better idea of the reading abilities of your students:

1. Ask the students to read something in class (silently) and watch them. If their lips are moving slightly or if they are reading noticeably slower than the others, they might be weaker readers. They may be reading slowly because of second language background, a learning disability, weak word recognition skills, or too little background information. On the other hand, students who, without having been asked, hold a pencil or pen to mark the text as they read may be stronger readers.
2. Listen to students' class discussion in terms of reading comprehension. Ask students to state what the main point or the main information in a reading assignment is. The ability to explain the main idea of a text usually indicates a high level of reading competence.
3. Ask the class to write a short summary–in class and with books open–of something they have read. Though summary-writing is a skill, even unpracticed summaries can give you an idea of the degree of comprehension of the reading.
   
4. Without making the task seem threatening, ask students to read something out loud. During a conference with you, a student can read aloud something the student has written or a section of a textbook under discussion. Very halting or inaccurate reading usually means a low level of comprehension.

I will be discussing ways to help weak readers read more effectively in the weeks to come.

I pass along two of the responses to last week's Reading Brief: A faculty member suggested that it would be interesting to ask textbook sales people about the grade levels their various books are written for. Also, Jaki Fesq of the Math Department has a more accurate count of placements in the developmental courses than I had. Excluding the many students who successfully take the Compass test a second time in order to place out of developmental courses, about 13 percent of our first-time full-time freshman take developmental reading. The same percent take developmental writing, and about four and a half times that number place into non-credit math courses.

Next week: How We Read. Part I: Reading From the Bottom Up

10/3/2002
Reading Brief #4: How We Read Part I. Reading From the Bottom Up
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

Here is basically what your eyes and brain are doing when you read:

The eyes glance at a few curvy figures lined up on a page or screen and the brain recognizes them as letters and words. Everyone's eyes move from glance to glance at about the same speed. But a fluent reader looking at familiar reading material can see a phrase of four or five words, about 25 letters, all at one time. If the material is unfamiliar or the reader is less fluent, the glance may take in only one or two words.

The visual information from each glance goes to the short-term memory, where about six or seven glances' worth of information are held for about five seconds and interpreted. This is where we read the meaning of an individual sentence or clause. The capacity of the short-term memory is modest. If someone gives you seven random words or numbers to remember, you will be able to. If they give you twelve, your short-term memory won't be able to hang on to them (unless you group them in some way). Small differences have large consequences here. High-abililty readers can retain more word chunks than low-ability readers and can thus understand sentences more easily.

So a reader has to keep moving or else the pieces get lost. This shortness of short-term memory is one reason why reading very slowly does not help comprehension; it interferes with it. A slow reader may literally forget the beginning of the sentence by the time he or she has read the end.

Sentences are processed in cycles. As a sentence is understood, its meaning is added to the slowly growing image in the long-term memory of what the text is about, then most of the detailed information in the sentence is forgotten, the next sentence is processed, then forgotten, and so on.

Students are often disappointed that they can't remember what they read. We can reassure them that forgetting countless details is a necessary part of the process and that the best way to remember the important information is to understand the reading thoroughly in the first place.

From eyes (letters and words) to short-term memory (sentences) to long-term memory (text meaning): this is the bottom-up aspect of reading.

Next week: Reading from the top down.

10/10/2002
Reading Brief #5: How We Read, Part II Reading From the Top Down
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

Last week's Reading Brief discussed how the eyes and the short term memory take in text and understand the sentences. But it is misleading to think of reading as the process of simply following the text on the page or screen. Reading is just as much a matter of what is not on the page as it is of the printed words.

1. Background Knowledge. Ironically, you can't understand what you read unless you already know a lot about it. If you were reading an article about restaurants but had only slight experience with restaurants (which is the case with many poor people and people in other countries), you would struggle with even the simplest sentences. Because we do know about restaurants, we can understand, remember, and even anticipate the restaurant-related information.
   Students often lack the background knowledge about the topics we assign to read about. Just as often, they have some background but fail to activate it. Faced with an essay about restaurants as required reading for a college course, they may forget how much they already know, unless a professor prompts them.
   
2. Purpose. We are almost always looking for something when we read–-even if it is just entertainment. Motivation and purpose make the reading process selective. The brain of a good reader knows what to look for, what to skip over, and when to stay flexible. An essay on current trends in restaurants will be read differently by an economist, a chef, a parent of young children, or a hungry English teacher. Students often read without purpose. Their stereotypical question, "Will this be on the test?" reflects their need for motivation and selection.

Sources:

• Smith, Frank. Understanding Reading. 5th ed. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994.
• Guthrie, John T., and Allan Wigfield. Engagement and Motivation in Reading. In Handbook of Reading Research, Vol. III. Michael L. Kamil et al, eds. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000.

10/17/2002
Reading Brief #6: Helping Students Read Better, Reading Strategies that Don't (Always) Work
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

For the last several decades, reading researchers have tried to answer the question of what methods work best for helping students understand and remember what they read. Two of the methods they have studied are the most popular ones: underlining (or highlighting) and note-taking. The results, you'll be disappointed to learn, have been very mixed.

Readers understand and remember a text when they have a genuine interaction with it. Underlining and highlighting are usually too passive as processes to foster this interaction. In one study, students were given a text already underlined (which is often the case when students buy used books); the marked texts did nothing to boost comprehension or recall.

In other studies, a full re-reading of a text, because it can generate new thoughts and questions, was often as effective as underlining, if not more so, in helping students understand and remember.

Note-taking seems to be effective if the student takes notes that are appropriate for the task the professor wants from the student later. If the student writes notes on all the details and the professor assigns an opinion essay, the notes are almost useless. If the student takes notes on the main points but the test asks for detailed information, the student would have been better off re-reading.

Underlining and note-taking can be effective if you, the professor, walk students through the process a couple of times. Show them how you would mark or take notes on a text in order to prepare for a later test or essay. Ask students occasionally what they underlined or what notes they took and discuss the options.

Next week: Helping Students Read Better: What Works

Sources:

10/31/2002
Reading Brief #8: Reading Strategies that Work - Visual Organizers
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

At last week's Faculty Development workshop, tables of faculty put the words "Learning College" in the center or at the top of easel pads, wrote on post-it notes, and stuck them on the easel pads. They arranged the labels naming parts of the college to show groups, connections, differences, and they wrote on the lines connecting the post-its.

The same process of visually organizing information is a successful way for readers to understand and remember what they have read. The process requires a person to think about the whole of the text, the parts of the text, and the relationships among the parts–-which is exactly what successful reading entails.

A typical diagram shows a circle for the main topic in the middle of the page with other circles connected to it with related topics, then smaller circles, etc. Flow charts and time lines are also effective. Sounds easy, but for students who cannot "see" how an essay or a chapter and its information are organized, it is elusive. As with summary writing, you need to show your students how you do it and then give them feedback about their practice. When students crumple up the first try, they are probably on the right track.

Next Week: Asking Questions

Sources:

• Duke, Neil K., and P. David Pearson. "Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension." In What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction. 3rd edition. Alan E. Farstrup and S. Jay Samuels, editors. Interantional Reading Association, 2002.
• Nist, Sherrie L., and Michele L. Simpson. "College Studying." In Handbook of Reading Research, Volume III, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2000.

11/6/2002
Reading Brief #9: Reading Strategies that Work - Asking Questions
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

"When students generate questions about what they have read, they are actively processing text information and monitoring their understanding of the information. As a result, their text comprehension improves" (Nist 655).

Student have been ANSWERING questions--questions from teachers, questions in their books--for as long as they have been in school. But they are not often required to ASK questions (even though we ask them hopefully if they have any). Formulating, asking, and discussing questions about their reading requires them to elaborate on it and connect with it--both elements of effective reading.

But as with summarizing and drawing visual maps, asking questions takes practice. You might give your students specific types of questions to ask, such as "Why" questions or comparison questions. You can encourage a range of questions, from straightforward ones about what they don't understand, to speculative ones about why something in the text happens as it does or what the author's purpose might have been in a given passage.

Next Week: Reciprocal Reading

Sources:

• Duke, Neil K., and P. David Pearson. "Effective Practices for Developing Reading Comprehension." In What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction. 3rd edition. Alan E. Farstrup and S. Jay Samuels, editors. Interantional Reading Association, 2002.
• Nist, Sherrie L., and Michele L. Simpson. "College Studying." In Handbook of Reading Research, Volume III, Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 2000.

11/14/2002
Reading Brief #10: Reading Strategies that Work - Reciprocal Reading
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

Reciprocal reading is different than the time-tested reading strategies for individuals that the Reading Briefs have described so far. Rather, it is a classroom approach that combines a number of those strategies. Basically, students work in pairs, taking turns every few minutes reading a portion of a text out loud while the listening student is directed to interrupt with questions; when a question is asked, the reader stops and both students discuss it. After each student's turn reading, the listener summarizes what has been read and then begins reading the next section. It is essential that students NOT take notes or write anything that would distract them from their reading, listening, and talking; they can write later. The process can be adapted to any course in which the textbook offers challenging ideas, complex information, or problems.

Reciprocal reading not only brings together the strategies of reading aloud, drawing on background knowledge, questioning, and summarizing. It also places reading in a social setting. Current reading research emphasizes that we are not isolated individuals when we think about what we have read. We process reading in the context of other people's ideas and expectations. Reciprocal reading brings that context into the classroom.

Next week: Reading the Page vs. Reading the Screen

Sources:

• Burke, Jim. The English Teacher's Companion. Heinemann, Boynton/Cook. 1999.

11/21/2002
Reading Brief #11: Reading the Page vs. Reading the Screen
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

How different is the way we read text on the printed page from the way we read web material and e-mail on a computer's monitor?

The terminology is a place to start. Web designers talk about web "users"; they don't call their audience "readers." We typically "use" a web site to find brief information and then to move on to the next one. Except for an occasional long e-mail that we would probably print out, we use e-mail in the same, quick way.

Computer "reading" is limited, ironically, by the ancient format of the scroll, a vertical format that becomes disorienting if the scroll is long. So the rule of thumb for web designers is to fit only two or three screens of information on to a web "page." Each web page is brief, designed to make sense by itself (since a user may not be following a specific order), and inviting us to move on.

Thus the web is a vehicle for coming and going, following our whim and our choice. By contrast, the paper page of a book or periodical encourages us to stay put in order to follow a pre-set sequence of information, argument, or story.
How can we help students use the internet better? They love the computer, but they are not skilled at searching or at fully exploring links. The art of browsing is essential with a computer and only secondary with a book.

How can we and our students "read" a web site critically? Web sites focus our attention forcefully through graphic design and the links they offer. We can learn to ask, what should I be seeing here that I am not? What links have been left out? How are my choices being directed?

Next week: Reading the Page vs. Reading the Screen: Gains and Losses

Sources:

• My thanks to Professor John Sullivan for his home-page sites on human-computer interaction and for the suggestion of the excellent Yale site on web design at http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/manual/contents.html.

Other Sources:

• Bolter, David. "Hypertext and the Question of Visual Literacy." In Handbook of Literacy and Technology: Transformation is a Post-Typographic World. David Reinking et al, editors. 1998.
• Gilster, Paul. Digital Literacy. Wiley, 1997.

12/2/2002
Reading Brief #12: Reading the Page vs. Reading the Screen—Gains and Losses
Brock Haussamen, English Department
A CAITL Fellowship Project

When we think about the computer and the role it has come to play, it is tempting to compare its impact to that of the book. What effect will web literacy have a century from now, compared to the literacy of the printed text? What will have been gained and lost?

In GUTENBERG ELEGIES, Sven Birkerts speculates on the large and long-term changes: On-line reading extends developments in reading that have already occurred over the last several centuries. From the Middle Ages until some time after 1750, people read intensively--a few books, such as the Bible, over and over. By 1800, many read extensively--varied texts, including newspapers and magazines--and they read them only once. Now, via the web, we read even more extensively and in even smaller pieces.

Among the possible gains from web literacy: more perspectives on any subject; the opportunities for seeing the complexities of interrelationships; the capacity to accommodate a broader range of information and stimuli simultaneously; the erosion of old biases and their replacement by more tolerance, by greater understanding of relativism in values.

Among the possible losses for the web generations compared to the print generations: a reduced attention span; less experience of the duration and depth that we associate with reverie; impatience with sustained inquiry; because electronic images always feel "present," estrangement from a sense of the past; estrangement from local community; less of a core in the individual of strongly held beliefs and vision.

This is the next-to-last Reading Brief. I hope you have found the Briefs to be interesting and worth reading. Next week, I will try to find out just that. Since assessment is important in educational projects and is always a challenge when it comes to reading, next week's Brief will invite you to respond to some assessment questions.