Learning From Readings and Lectures

Learning Strategies Common to Readings and Lectures

Effective learning takes much less time if you “study smart.” To “study smart,” you need to approach learning in a deliberate way. To study smart, think about the strategies and tactics you need to be using to master a learning challenge. Be aware of any need to change strategies and tactics that are not working well for you.

Think hard during learning.

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The best learning occurs during lectures and videos if you make it a point to be alert and aware. The best approach is to think about what you are trying to memorize. Ask yourself questions about the information, such as:

• What is missing that would be useful to know?
• What do I not understand?
• Where can I get this explained better?
• How can I apply this information to what I already know, to other parts of the course, to other courses, and to different kinds of problems?
• What new ideas does this give me?

Think about the information in different ways in other contexts. Think about how the information relates to what you thought you already knew. What is new about it that you need to incorporate into your knowledge arsenal?

Readings

Anybody old enough to be taking these lessons on improving learning and memory knows how to read. Right? Not necessarily.

First, we have to address how students are taught the mechanics of reading. Significant numbers of people were not taught phonics, which was the traditional way of teaching literacy for hundreds of years in almost all languages. Then some educators thought learners could just skip the phonics stage and move directly to “whole-language.” The basic idea of whole-language reading is to prevent learners from breaking down sounds in a word individually, but rather to fix the eyes on whole words and associate them with prior knowledge.

I think that the correct way to literacy is to begin first with phonics. Then, as learners master the sounds of the alphabet, they can sound out strange words and decode their meaning. Once phonics is learned, whole language becomes a way to read words, rather than consciously sounding out each syllable. The International Reading Association (IRA) has supported the inclusion of phonics in the whole-language approach to literacy.

Actually, this still leaves the problem of plodding along one word at a time. Optimal reading requires clusters of multiple words at a time, speeding the amount of material accessed. Thinking about word clusters imparts linguistic meaning faster and better than plodding through one word after another.

To see word clusters properly, you need to train your eyes to pop along from one fixation point in a line to the next point to the right, then the next, and so on. You might not know that everything the eyes see, whether it is text or nature scenes, results from quick snaps of eye movement from one fixation target to another. These quick jumps are called saccades.

The trick is to expand the size of the visual target that is seen with each snap: that is, increase the number of words you see at each snap of the eyes from one fixation point to the next fixation point. Just by trying to do this, you can increase the number of words seen at each fixation. At first, it may just be one or two words. Soon, your eyes will take in four or five words with each snap of the eyes.

This kind of training requires deliberate practice, but if you think hard about what you are trying to do, it starts to become automatic. Good readers take in a whole line of text in a book, for example, in two to three eye snaps. Tests show that readers with average reading speed can double or triple their reading speeds with no loss of comprehension.

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Key points to remember:

• Preview the reading material to get a feel for what it is like. Note the heading and subheadings. Think about the overall scope of what is covered and not covered.
• Think about your purpose ahead of time. Ask yourself, “What am I supposed to get out of this reading?” “What am I supposed to understand and remember.”
• Skim first, looking for the paragraphs that matter the most. The first and last sentences in a paragraph usually provide the best clues as to which paragraph is most important.
• Make yourself interested in what you must read. You punish yourself by allowing boredom.
• Adjust your pace according to the denseness and difficulty of information.
• Try to reduce the number of times you skip back to re-read. If this is a problem, work on your concentration and focus. Don’t let your mind wander when you read. Definitely, do not multi-task.
• At first, you may want to move your finger or a pointer underneath each line to guide your eye snaps. But as you practice and get better, try to eliminate this crutch.
• Do not move tongue or lips to simulate saying the words inside your head. If you tend to do this, make it a point to hold the tip of your tongue against the roof of your mouth.
• At each eye snap, think about what the words, as a group, mean.
• Make sure you actually see all the words at each fixation point. If you can’t see all the words at each fixation, decrease the number of words you expect to register until you get better at this.
• As you realize you are getting better at these eye snaps, increase the speed of snapping.
• Pause from time to time to reflect on what you just read. Ask yourself to recall the information you just read. Ask yourself how you could and should use the information. Ask yourself how the information fits your existing knowledge and understanding. Ask yourself what you still do not understand. Ask yourself what information you need or want that has not been covered yet.
• When you finish, do something with what you just read. Self-quiz. Write notes. Report to others what you just read. Use the information in a different way.

If you search on the web for “learning how to speed read,” you will find numerous explanations of how to improve reading mechanics. There are even computer apps that help train your eyes to attend rapidly presented words, one at a time in quick succession. See a review of 10 of these apps.

Many apps use the RSVP method in which words are presented at a preset speed. Sprint has a free browser-based trainer that allows you to increase the number of words presented each time, which helps you learn how to expand the size of the visual field. However, this method fails to teach you how to snap your eyes across a minimum number of fixation points per line of text (see this video). I have not found any apps that train you to do what really matters: snap your eyes appropriately across each line of text and engage larger and larger visual fields with each snap.

Lectures

Many of the thinking aspects mentioned above for reading also apply to learning from lectures or online videos. Lectures and videos may demand more attentiveness that reading because it is not so easy to slow things down or pause and go back to reconsider information that did not register well. To help information register more effectively, it helps to do some advanced preparation. Good teachers may give you a reading assignment related to the lecture. The more you learn from this pre-reading material, the more you will comprehend and remember from the lecture.

This brings up the point that the goal for lectures or videos is to learn as much as you can at the time. You may not get a second exposure to an unrecorded lecture. A classroom environment presents a special challenge. Once there, you are more or less trapped, and your time is pre-committed.

As long as you are in class, you might as well bring your A-game, so you get the most out of your time commitment. Students who are charged up, fully expecting to aim to remember everything presented in class, are the most likely to remember the most. Be engaged in the discussion if it is allowed. In my experience, both as a student and an instructor, I have found the best kind of engagement is asking good questions silently to yourself or of the teacher when questions are solicited. Asking good questions requires deep thinking, and deep thinking is the best kind of memory rehearsal. Such thinking and the Q&A that follow obviously can help understanding.

Everything learned in class is something you don’t have to study much after class. Besides, being fully engaged in classroom activities makes the class more interesting—certainly more useful.

Get “up” for Class. Expect to Remember Everything.

It should go without saying that you need to be rested. Sleep is vastly more important for learning than you probably realize. Not only does being rested keep you from wasting your time by dozing in class, but the memory of what was presented in class is largely consolidated that night as you sleep.

Students should take notes during the lecture or watching a video. But in my experience, they get little good advice on how to take notes. Perhaps this is a good time to re-read lesson 5 on note-taking. Note-taking is the standard process whereby information is transferred from the teacher’s notes to the student’s notes (sometimes without passing through the mind of either). The problem is that students are too busy writing notes and not busy enough thinking about what the teacher says and means.

Good teachers hand out note outlines before class so students can pay attention to the lecture and get engaged. Such “skeleton notes” give the students the freedom to leave out things they already know or can figure out. This approach really pays off when it comes time to study for exams.

Note-taking should be minimal. Follow the principles given for reading. The idea is to think about what is being said, asking yourself or the teacher questions, expressing the ideas in your own terms, making mental images, and so on. What do you do in case you miss some key information while doing all this thinking? If the teacher permits, use a tape recorder and use variable speed, so you can slow down for difficult parts and speed up through parts that are not particularly useful.

Next Lesson: Lesson 11. Learning and Memorizing Math Concepts