How well are we doing in comprehension of text as a nation? You know the answer. We are doing poorly when it comes to genuine comprehension:
And look at math vs. reading:
And this, from a Christian Science Monitor article on 12th grade NAEP results in reading:
In many ways, the 2013 reading scores for 12th-graders were even more discouraging [than the lack of progress in math]. While the average score of 288 was unchanged from 2009 – and two points higher than in 2005, which represented a nadir for the reading score – it was lower than the average of 292 back in 1992.
A full 25 percent of 12th-graders in 2013 scored below basic, compared with 20 percent in 1992, and just 37 percent scored at or above proficient, compared with 40 percent in 1992. Those scoring at the proficient level could answer questions requiring them to recognize the paraphrase of an idea from a historical speech and the interpretation of a paragraph in such a speech.
[I later added the NAEP chart on 12th grade reading, just above, since my focus here is on older students, and the trend is so dismal].
What should we infer from the data?
Numerous causes and their implied solutions, as readers know, have been proposed for flat reading scores: poverty, low expectations, inadequate background knowledge, an anti-boy bias in schools (especially in terms of book selection), IQ links to reading ability, computer games, TV, etc. etc.
The utterly flat national trend line, over decades, says to me that none of these theories holds up well, no matter how plausible each may seem to its proponents. Perhaps it’s time to explore a more radical but common sense notion: maybe we don’t yet understand reading comprehension and how it develops over time.
Maybe we have jumped to solutions before understanding the problems of naïve and superficial comprehension. Maybe we still haven’t specified, in diagnostic detail, what real readers do when they supposedly read books and articles and try to comprehend – regardless of what “good readers” supposedly do.
At the very least: it is a good time to question the premise that we understand the problem.
The black box. Reading is the hardest thing in the world to teach and assess because the reading mind is a black box: we cannot see inside the mind to see what people are doing when they read. We can only infer what readers are doing from what they tell us, write us, and show us. But what they tell, write, or show is neither direct nor necessarily valid evidence. (Maybe they read well but write or speak poorly, for example). Self-reporting of mental states is often inaccurate; expert readers may have forgotten how they came to learn to read for understanding; young readers may lack metacognitive ability and language to describe their reading as it unfolds.
In later posts I plan to share the surprisingly thin evidence about how readers actually read when they try to comprehend text. For now, I merely ask you to keep an open mind.
My own trials and tribulations with reading. I have always been puzzled by the idea of what it means to read because I was a poor reader in school – without realizing it! For a long time I got by. My analytic skills and basic smarts hid the fact, from me as well as my teachers in school, that I could not do what we now call close reading and core comprehension acts, such as summarize an author’s point, state the “moral of the story,” or identify the key “moves” in an argument (and pose questions about those moves). There were hints: an English teacher who said I was “too literal” a reader (without telling me how to be otherwise); a teacher who said I “didn’t seem to be thinking” about what I was reading.
It wasn’t until much later – in college – that I became more aware of my failures as a reader and more self-conscious of how limited my take on “reading” really was. The “reality therapy” feedback became unavoidable: I was put on probation at the end of my sophomore year. (A sad irony in that I was attending St. John’s College, the so-called Great Books school.) Yet, I knew from seminar discussions and feedback on papers that my performance was weaker than it should have been. But I still didn’t understand exactly why or how. As in most high schools and all colleges, alas, I was not taught to read hard books, I was merely assigned them.
I didn’t realize that I wasn’t reading properly until my junior year when I serendipitously spotted a book on a friend’s shelf in his dorm room: How to Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren. Within a few minutes of skimming the first chapters I was bolted intellectually awake: the authors were vividly describing my bad habits as a reader and offering some clear and easy-to-follow tips on how to remedy them when faced with challenging texts. I was helped to realize that when I “read” I merely scanned words passively; I took no steps to converse with the text. Slowly but surely my reading improved by following their advice, the gist of which was to force oneself to ask and answer certain probing questions of the text, in writing, in the margins. To comprehend better is, in part, to force oneself to think more effectively.
Vital hints in the literature on literacy. Thus, as my wife puts it, when is the problem of incomplete comprehension one of reading and when is it one of thinking? What is well-intentioned but ineffective reading/thinking, and how can one recognize the problem as such? This passage from Kylene Beers really resonated with me when I read it last year as part of my multi-year action research project on this topic:
I once thought that if my students could make an inference, any inference, then my teaching woes would be over… The problem with comprehension, it appeared, was that kids couldn’t make an inference.
I shared this frustration with Anne [the Principal]…. I stood leaning against her office door, complaining that that the kids she had given me that year could not make an inference. She simply replied: “Well, teach them.”
“Teach them what?”
“Inferencing. Teach them how to make an inference.”
“You can’t teach someone how to make an inference. It’s inferential. It’s just something you can or can’t do,” I said, beginning to mumble.
“Tell me you don’t really believe that,” she said….
I began to wonder just how I would teach inferencing. It took years for me to get a handle on that one.
As a teacher I, too, saw that some of my bright students could not read for meaning, although I often couldn’t figure out their problems. I could only say “Re-read it carefully and take notes” or some other advice. They, like I had, protested that they had “re-read” and “done the readings.” Yet, even after re-reading and taking notes they were often unable to draw critical inferences about the text as a whole. What, then, were they doing when “reading”?
Oscar’s desire to drop my elective answered the question for at least one student – in a shocking way. When I asked him what his troubles were as a reader, he replied: “I just cannot memorize all the pages you are assigning!”
Ouch. He really did believe “reading” was “scanning and memorizing for later recall.” But wasn’t that, in its own way, what I had done much of my academic life? He at least worked hard to memorize it all! I hadn’t even done that.
Chris Tovani offers a snippet of dialogue that underscores our need to better understand readers trying to understand:
“Luke, why don’t you try to get unstuck.”
“Nothing helps me. Re-reading is a waste of time.”
“Try another fix-up strategy, then.”
“What’s a fix-up strategy?…When I was younger I tried sounding out word out but that didn’t really help.”
“Did you learn to do anything else?”
“No, not really.”
“Does anyone else have a strategy he or she can suggest?”
“I don’t do anything,” brags Kayla.
“You don’t do anything?” I asked.
“Nope. I keep reading and hope it makes sense when I’m done.”
“And what if it doesn’t?”
“Then, oh well.”
I would venture to hypothesize that for many HS students their reading strategy is “Read on, then, oh well.” But let’s find out.
The “re-reading” strategy is a perfect example of our failure to understand the problem. Why would “re-reading” a passage, by itself, clear up what was confused in the first place? All the re-readers are doing is – re-reading. They aren’t thinking differently about what they are re-reading. As Tovani says, telling someone to “think harder” is useless advice. Yet, “Re-read!” is the same unhelpful advice if we don’t know how to re-read or whether we are re-reading “properly.” Too much of the reading-strategy literature amounts to such glib advice.
My first foray in writing about some of this was in a blog entry two years ago about the reading strategies. Boy, did I get a ton of hate mail from people who thought I had gone to the dark side and allied myself with the non-progressive camp. I had done no such thing, even if my prose was a bit dramatic. I had mostly raised these questions (and tried to clarify terms).
Indeed, a few of the more mainstream and thoughtful writers on literacy have made the very point that I was criticized for, such as Barnhouse & Vinton:
As we pondered what was happening with our strategy instruction, we came to several conclusions. The first was the discomfiting realization that while we were grounding our lessons in real literature… we were, in effect, using those books to practice strategies in isolation…. As it was, most of the students’ connections stayed on the surface level… This led us to the conclusion that some of the so-called comprehension strategies – especially visualizing, predicting, connecting, and questioning – seemed aimed more at helping students develop the habits of active and engaged readers rather than to specifically help them comprehend more than they might have… We would need, in effect, to find strategies for the strategies to ensure that they were used as meaning-making tools, not as end products…
So, let’s go slowly. When you as a teacher of older students tell students to “read” and “re-read” a challenging text, what exactly are you assuming that they should be doing in their heads? What do they assume you are asking them to do when you ask them to read or re-read? And – most importantly – what do you think they will actually do when they get stuck? Is Tovani correct that, regardless of training, adolescent readers will have little or no intelligent approach? (I am not asking what they “should” do but what they will likely do.) Do they use the reading strategies or do they forget all about them or approach them randomly or revert to some other bad habit or naïve approach?
Monitor yourself as a reader. What, in fact, do you do when you read challenging text? What do you do when you do not understand on first pass? Try a little test, below: “read” the following paragraphs, then post a comment about what you were doing as you were “reading.” Do not tell us what you think the passage means; tell us metacognitively, as best you can, what you believe you were doing with your eyes and thinking with your mind to try to determine the meaning of the text.
Unlike the famous ambiguous passage about “piles of things” developed by Bransford and Johnson for use in cognitive research (which we analyzed in Understanding by Design), this is a real text: the very first pages of the Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. What is Kant saying here?
THERE can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience. For how should our faculty of knowledge be awakened into action did not objects affecting our senses partly of themselves produce representations, partly arouse the activity of our understanding to compare these representations, and, by combining or separating them, work up the raw material of the sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects which is entitled experience? In the order of time, therefore, we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with experience all our knowledge begins.
But though all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. For it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge (sensible impressions serving merely as the occasion) supplies from itself. If our faculty of knowledge makes any such addition, it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish it from the raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in separating it.
This, then, is a question which at least calls for closer examination, and does not allow of any off-hand answer: whether there is any knowledge that is thus independent of experience and even of all impressions of the senses. Such knowledge is entitled a priori, and distinguished from the empirical which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience.
The expression ‘a priori‘ does not, however, indicate with sufficient precision the full meaning of our question. For it has been customary to say, even of much knowledge that is derived from empirical sources, that we have it or are capable of having it a priori, meaning thereby that we do not derive it immediately from experience, but from a universal rule — a rule which is itself, however, borrowed by us from experience. Thus we would say of a man who undermined the foundations of his house, that he might have known a priori that it would fall, that is, that he need not have waited for the experience of its actual falling. But still he could not know this completely a priori. For he had first to learn through experience that bodies are heavy, and therefore fall when their supports are withdrawn.
In what follows, therefore, we shall understand by a priori knowledge, not knowledge independent of this or that experience, but knowledge absolutely independent of all experience. Opposed to it is empirical knowledge, which is knowledge possible only a posteriori, that is, through experience. A priori modes of knowledge are entitled pure when there is no admixture of anything empirical. Thus, for instance, the proposition, ‘every alteration has its cause’, while an a priori proposition, is not a pure proposition, because alteration is a concept which can be derived only from experience.
After reading the passage, consider the following questions:
- Using arrows and labels, what was the visual “itinerary” of your reading. Where did your eyes go to, when, and why, as you read?
- What questions, if any, did you ask yourself as you read? Mark the places on the text.
- Where did you get stuck, if any place? (Mark the text) What, then, did you do, if you got stuck?
- If you could not “unstuck” yourself at each moment of being stuck, what did you do next – and why?
- Which “reading strategies” did you use when (without my having prompted you to use any)? If not, why not, do you think? If so, which ones did you consciously choose and why?
- Where /when did you start feeling dumb/frustrated if at all. What did you do/feel about it if you did? If you quit, say where and why.
- On a scale of 1-4, how confident are you of your understanding of Kant’s opening setup of his inquiry?
After this self-monitoring, take this formative quiz:
- Circle the 1-2 key sentences in this selection, and be ready to explain why you are confident that they are key even if you are not sure what they mean.
- Title this reading and be ready to explain why you gave it that title
- In a sentence, state what Kant intends to explore. And speculate as to why he might want to explore such a question.
Here is one commenter’s stab at the exercise: Kant Reading Exercise
As I have long said, we give far too little feedback and too much advice. Beers, for example, has a nice chart in which she describes in general form what non-comprehenders do, but it is very brief and general, e.g. “can read all the words but consistently has difficulty asking questions, creating questions, discussing the text, doesn’t “see” anything in his mind while reading, thinking beyond literal questions…” and the book focuses on advice. I am calling for a far more intense look at what non-comprehenders do. Otherwise feedback and advice are easily too generic.
But to give feedback you have to somehow “see” what the reader is doing – which we said above is very hard. It is time, however, to pause in offering non-comprehending readers so much advice and to spend more time in trying to figure out what readers are actually doing in their heads when they supposedly “read.” We might then, like good coaches, offer highly specific feedback based upon what was working and what wasn’t in the readers’ attempts; and only offer specific advice about what to do, based on the specific attempt and the feedback. We would thus want to do far more ungraded comprehension and self-reporting quizzes than we now do.
In follow-up posts, I plan to review briefly the literature from the past 30 years on what readers do (including look at some of the eye-tracking research) and explain why I believe a core premise behind the teaching of the reading strategies is flawed: just because “good readers” do certain things, doesn’t mean we understand how to improve “weak” readers. The strategies – e.g. visualize, predict, connect, re-read, infer, etc. – may only be correlated, not causal. (And, as I will again argue, some of the so-called strategies simply do not pass muster.) So it should not surprise us that reading scores do not improve much if the strategies are taught and learned. Finally, I will have some reports from teachers who have volunteered to give the previous survey or another like it to their students to see what we can learn from just studying kids trying to understand.
If you teach English, try out some of the self-monitoring questions I proposed that you consider, above; and report back to us!
In response to the first few comments and emails:
PS: Yes, I actually do understand the Kant passage – after dozens of readings and multiple under-graduate and graduate classes on Kant. I didn’t really understand the passage – even after a dozen or more re-readings! – until I was helped to understand what the point of the Critique of Pure Reason was, and how Kant was arguing with Hume’s view about what we can understand. That is the paradox of reading, to me: you cannot understand the part until you understand the whole and the “great conversation”; but you cannot understand the whole unless you understand the parts through close reading.
What, then, reading and English teachers? How do we better help students understand what they do and do not understand? How can they better self-assess their degree of understanding – and use that feedback to better understand?
PPS: There are some fabulous suggestions in the comments thus far for how to address the problem of poor comprehension. But note my caution in reply and the focus of this post: what unsuccessful readers actually do is what we need to understand better, first. Then, we’ll be in a far better position to weigh and propose solutions that are valid and personalized for different readers.
55 Responses
Being taught the structure of language through diagramming sentences helped me understand the main and subordinate ideas in sentences complex and compound (and compound-complex) while appreciating and understanding the relationship of modifiers and qualifiers to those ideas, if used. I then could understand the relationship of one sentence to the next.
This enabled me to understand my college texts and appreciate some of the best literature the world has created. It also illuminated the uses of figurative language and rhetorical devices in writing.
Although I remain a poor speller, I am forever grateful that I was taught phonics, prefixes and suffixes, etc as well as Latin and Greek roots.
Your example from Kant is wicked. it has to be almost unintelligible to almost everybody. When I was a kid I started with Spinoza, which I found completely unintelligible, and so avoided Kant. It’s not too late to have another go (with Kant)!
More to the point, can we be sure that there have not been subtle (or not so subtle) changes in the tests or the evaluation, or the scoring over the period 1990 to 2013 which might affect the interpretation of the data.
You might find this relevant, it’s about how kids learn math and what they actually learn:
http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2015/02/11/the-church-of-the-right-answer/
I think the NAEP reading data is pretty solid – and it aligns with data from state tests on questions related to ‘main idea’ as I noted in my article on test results a few years ago. Thanks for the math link.
Really like the references to Beers and Tovani’s work. I also thought looking at Ellin Keene’s “Outcomes and Dimensions of Understanding”
Reblogged this on longing for theory and commented:
I’ve never reblogged anything before. I’m struggling with a post on schooling which I keep thinking is too broadly rejectionist, if that’s a word. Reading this post this morning was really helpful. Here’s the part that relates and resonated with me: “The utterly flat national trend line, over decades, says to me that none of these theories [about problems with reading comprehension as seen in flat score trends over time] holds up well, no matter how plausible each may seem to its proponents. Perhaps it’s time to explore a more radical but common sense notion: maybe we don’t yet understand reading comprehension and how it develops over time.”
What I’m thinking are two big thoughts: 1. that maybe we don’t yet understand learning very well, and are flailing around trying to fine-tune in the wrong paradigm (the “hows”) , and 2. our schooling systems have become unmoored from, or maybe were never connected to, life for many students (the “whats” and the “whys”).
I am with you on the two big thoughts. We cannot possibly understand “learning” yet or we would not see so many students flailing about and bored; or merely trying to please teachers and parents. The 2nd follows form the first, as Dewey long ago noted: if school doesn’t live what it preaches (critical, active, democratic life) then it cannot possibly produce graduates who will be ready for such a life.
I don’t feel rejectionist. In fact, I thought Holt, Kozol, Friere et al went too far that way. I think school can be re-designed to promote genuine learning – if we have the will to explore the aim and re-design according to what we learn about learning.
I absolutely agree with what you are saying. I have a difficult time helping students learn to read because I never had trouble reading myself. (In 1st Grade my teacher gave me 5th Grade books.) I have attended several RTI training sessions and done research on my own and have never found a good way to assist those who read poorly.
This is a huge issue: far too many teachers of reading love to read and are good at it. That sets up trouble from the outset.
An interesting data trend.
You quickly discover a student’s thinking when you ask them to read a piece and make (not “take”) notes. In 8th grade I was accustomed to a string of bullet facts, all of equal importance. I have since introduced the painstaking process of outlining to the students, and have been using this strategy for 15 years as a means of synthesizing text. Students intuitively lack an understanding of the hierarchy of information in a text; they haven’t been asked to dissect text in a visual manner. Common Core is demanding that they do. Students do not, as habit, read mindfully. Outlining forces this, and then provides visual evidence of meta-cognition that occurs during the process. Most of my struggling readers balk at the outline assignment, and I can quickly flag those that need assistance.
Here’s an example of a student outline of a chapter section on Atoms: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1exH4FJAka6_K1BJIOIEUo8IlDcZfAn7jkiWIvsYz130/edit?usp=sharing
You’ll see that examples are required to be in italics. This tells me that the reader knows that it is the most specific piece of information, and therefore is indented the most. The text uses large category “blue sections,” and smaller category “green sections.” Students indicate blue section titles in ALL CAPS, and green section titles with an underline. This allows us to see that all blue sections are vertically aligned, because they of equal importance, and likewise with green sections.
The process works. And the style and form of the outline itself reveals concrete evidence of the reading process, hopefully.
Rubric: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xl9SiQbpjX09vnBW5jxHaFK9gbwPg-peo60ikaEc2gE/edit?usp=sharing
So helpful, Rob. Thanks especially for the examples.
Years ago, my juniors were struggling with Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” which didn’t seem like hard reading to me. Respecting the truth that they were striving to understand it but still failing to make meaning, I remembered a colleague’s once talking about modeling “reading protocols.” Following that advice, I asked for volunteers to bring to school the next day a text they believed I would find very difficult. One student brought a page from one of her father’s law texts, which I thought would be a good choice. But I decided to use (believe it or not!) the first page of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason.” (I have no idea how the student made this choice.) I photo-copied the page so each student could see what I was struggling with, but their real task was to take notes on what I did, in an effort to understand the text, while reading aloud and also speaking my thoughts about the reading and how I might decipher it. We later compiled the list of strategies they had heard me use. The list filled the board. Then I paired students to re-read the class assignment, asking them to go one paragraph at a time and talking with one another about what Thoreau was really arguing. This worked incredibly well. For some students, it radically and consciously changed they way they approached difficult reading, including the Emerson essays that followed in that American Literature course.
I’ve repeated this several times since, and I remain indebted to the colleague who first told me about this approach.
Great story, Del! I find that the best Elementary teachers are extremely good at doing think-alouds with kids. It’s puzzling that we don’t do it more with older students.
Great post with some meaty questions. While I think we do have some data about what good readers do when they read, I thought you made a good point that knowing strategies that good readers use might not necessarily mean that that is why they are good readers- it could be correlative. Other causal factors might be in place as well. After reading and applying the ideas from a few outstanding books on teaching comprehension with Grade 7 and 8 students, I came to strongly believe that good readers approach reading with the intention and desire to understand what they read; they notice when they don’t understand something and they actively try to grasp the meaning in various ways. Poor readers seem to not notice and/or not care when they don’t understand parts of what they read; they thus end up with a superficial or partial grasp of the text. They might be able to pronounce all the words as they read aloud, but huge chunks are not registering cognitively. I totally agree as teachers that we and textbook providers sometimes approach the use of the strategies as ends in themselves, rather than tools to aid comprehension, and a child could demonstrate use of a strategy but still have limited comprehension because the use was ineffective.
The outstanding texts I referred to taught me the importance of modelling how I read challenging text, and explicitly showing how I keep track of my thinking as I read. I would stop when I was confused and record that confusion somehow, for example by writing “Huh? ” in the margin. I explained what I did when I didn’t understand, and named any strategies I used that helped me, such as predicting or re-reading. In particular, Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis’s text “Strategies That Work: Teaching comprehension for understanding and engagement ” (2nd Ed.), gave me lots of examples of student work, and black line masters of templates such as two column note making charts, to help students record their thinking both individually and collaboratively as they worked at making sense of texts.
As I worked with struggling readers, one thing I realized was that since they were not actively engaged in making sense, they were not asking questions of the text, a key strategy which in turn leads naturally to our brains making inferences and predictions. I had to prompt them with my own questions, and support them to use questions that came to mind as conduits to inferences based on connections they could make to their own lives/ experiences. All this we wrote in the margins of text or in response templates. They were learning to interact with text rather than passively read it.
John Hattie in his Visible Learning text of 2014, describes elaboration as the means to process information by adding to it meaningfully. The various teaching tools and techniques I learned were all aimed at modelling for students how to approach reading actively with the goal of understanding the text, and how to elaborate what they were reading and record their thinking along the way.
For interested teachers, the other very useful practical text along the same lines was by Harvey “Smokey” Daniels and Nancy Steineke: “Texts and Leasons for Content -Area Reading 2011. It offers lots of short to longer pieces of engaging texts for middle school students. In one of my blog posts, I wrote that the right text can make all the difference. Reading for meaning is often hard work for weak readers, and also for strong readers as texts become more complex. Having engaging texts goes a long way towards encouraging our weak readers to want to understand what they are reading. That is the first crucial step.
I look forward to your follow up,posts, Grant.
I copied the passage to a Word Document and took notes on my reading process – a helpful exercise for a teacher of reading. Let me know if you want me to email the word document.
Yes, please! gwiggins AT authenticeducation.org
As an English teacher and one time lover of philosophy, I loved this post. I was reading Emerson’s Self Reliance with my classes when again I realized my students weren’t comprehending the same way I was and I felt absolutely lost as to how to teach them to read Emerson, let alone Kant. Teaching how to read and comprehend difficult text is one of the most important things that I want to learn how to do. I have often felt that it is to my detriment as an English teacher that I enjoy and find reading easy, because it does not help me understand my students’ struggles.
I too would be happy to send you my notes on the reading process that I took, but I’d love to see the results and I look forward to the follow up posts.
Thank you for this honest post. I wish more English teachers had this same empathy for those, unlike themselves, who find reading unpleasant/difficult. I think it was my strength as a teacher that I had been a weak student! I think the suggestions made in other comments are good ones, and I promise you that How To Read A Book by Adler & Van Doren will be worth the read. I copied about 20 pages of it for my English and Philosophy students, and modeled some of the moves.And your observation that they weren’t comprehending as you wished is the beginning of the analysis that I was getting at in my post: we need to better understand their attempts, not just teach them new moves.
I think some (much?) of the problem is rooted Hirsch’s ideas that you dismiss. Reading is too often treated as if it is some type of singular skill. As if reading poems, novels, journal articles in physics, journal articles in sociology, newspaper articles and comic books is all the same thing. Become a good reader and you can read anything, heck you can teach yourself anything by reading, once you can read we are told. But this is empirically wrong. We should give up the idea that reading is just reading and make it much more context/content based, but it is rarely taught or discussed this way.
I dismiss Hirsch’s claims on grounds different from the ones you are stating: I completely agree with you that different genres demand different treatment. His argument is that background factual knowledge is everything (though there is precious little research to support his claims) in comprehension, as opposed to all kinds of background knowledge and experience that is ACTIVELY tapped. (The data are very clear: the problem is not storage but retrieval, when not prompted. And by his argument I could never read about dinosaurs and science fiction and comprehend it…)
Also, you offer claims here that are precisely what I want to investigate: what does happen when you read in a different genre? What, in fact, do kids do? Again, I am less interested at this point in solutions and more interested in knowing what different readers do in the face of reading hard material – including jumping genres.
I’ve always taken this to be Hirsch’s central argument. If you want someone to become a better reader of chemistry you need to teach them chemistry not “reading”. After fluent with phonics and decoding, content is king. This is the argument why reading drops off in 3/4 grade, specific content increases dramatically at this time.
There is no such thing as a enjoying reading or being a good reader unless we talk about what you are trying to read. People who say the love reading are being insincere, they love reading certain things: romance, crime, history etc. I guarantee I could find something that a “good reader” either can’t read or finds dreadful.
But there is no evidence that background knowledge is the key – it’s just claimed as a plausible reading of the data. The National Reading Panel rejected this idea by not even writing about it as a likely cause of the reading crisis. In fact, your last point contradicts the first point: I may be a terrible reader of poetry while a good reader of essays – and background knowledge per se has nothing to do with that fact. (This describes me, btw) That is precisely why we need to better understand what readers do when they read poems and essays before jumping to advice.
E.D. Hirsch has had a terrible time getting properly understood. His main claim, that for most kinds of reading, fluency and comprehension depend on a decent grasp of the “shorthand” writers use when communicating with peers, is unexceptionable. But when he and his associates touted it as a panacea and a marketing ploy (“What Your First Grader Needs to Know”, et. al.) he went off the rails. But the concept of core knowledge was a good one. It was taken too literally; students were subjected to quizzes and tests of thousands of factoids, totally cut off from context and meaning. But the enthusiastic reception he got in some quarters reflected a widespread feeling that kids were not learning much in school. When “skills” replaces content, as it has in so many schools, he was not far wrong.
But the issue is effective transfer, not ‘teaching’ of content. The data are clear: knowledge taught as factoids in isolation do not transfer. Nor is “background knowledge” just facts, as the literature makes clear: any relevant experience that one has had in life can help – but it has to be actively tapped. That’s why the research suggests that deliberately prompting for it and doing such things as Anticipation Guides makes it more likely that understanding will occur. More to the point, as I will show, the research makes clear that comprehension differences are LARGE – even when IQ and background knowledge are factored out of the equation in research.
I guess the question is what makes a kid a better reader of poetry: Learning content about transcendentalism and romanticism or learning an abstract skill to analyze a poem. I think this is empirically testable.
False choice. Poems demand different skills and, especially, emotional empathetic stance than reading essays, and many poems are not designed to reflect a philosophical stance. You have bought into the Hirsch false dilemma of “abstract” skills and “concrete helpful knowledge”. Background knowledge is of little value in understanding e.e cummings or, for that matter, Bob Dylan and Shakespeare’s sonnets. It’s not why a student gets stuck or unstuck in reading those things. And background knowledge plays little role in understanding Kant – as even Hirsch admitted to me in an email back and forth. Hirsch’s argument is all confirmation bias: I’ll show you a piece of writing that is unintelligible unless you have the needed background knowledge (e.g. a detailed piece on baseball from the sports pages is a common example used to support his views) – see??? No. Confirmation bias. When all our kids are poor readers for deep comprehension we should conclude that it’s because they lack background knowledge of what they are reading? (That doesn’t even make sense when reading most fiction). Anyone who teaches English and looks at student work -as I have – knows that “literal-mindedness” and a lack of understanding about how, exactly, to tackle complex text is a far more likely hypothesis.
So if students read in a shallow manner, they are missing the allusions, inferences and imagery the author is using. But the author is assuming the reader is getting the allusions, imagery and inferences. The author cannot possibly be using only imagery, allusion and inferences that he alone understands. He must be using ones that other people, his readers, are familiar with from the culture, history, or a shared common experience. If people don’t know these allusions, hints, inferences and suggestions they will always read in a shallow manner no matter what we do.
So much of reading has little to do with historical allusions. Furthermore, I can easily footnote the allusions – as most literary and poetry anthologies already do. Knowing the allusions doesn’t mean I understand the writing; missing some of the allusions doesn’t mean I can’t have a good understanding of the text. I am quite sure that I do not know dozens upon dozens of allusions that John Dewey makes in Democracy in Education – or, for that matter, that Kant makes in the Critique – but I think I have a pretty deep understanding of what he is saying and why he is saying it, based on close reading. What Hirsch has never been able to prove is that a lack of background knowledge is the chief cause of comprehension breakdown and premature quitting on the part of readers. He just picks plausible examples. Few researchers in literacy support his views, and even his colleague Willingham at UVA does not subscribe to his views.
Hirsch’s argument, by the way, leads to silly inferences: no one of one gender can understand a book by the other gender; no one who is of one race or background can understand texts about others; no text written hundreds of years ago can possibly be understood by present-day people, etc. without tons of background knowledge. The irony is the opposite: great books transcend experience, time, place, background. I do not need much background knowledge to appreciate the power of King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail or Plato’s Apology. Indeed, I have read both with kids, to great impact – without delving into any of the history surrounding both. I’m not saying background knowledge isn’t helpful, illustrative, engaging for most people. I’m saying that comprehension of text does not depend upon it to the extent that Hirsch claims. Otherwise, no kid would love any sophisticated “adult” book – yet, many do.
Thoughtful, as usual, Grant. One of my favorite activities is to ask my students to bring me materials they think I will have trouble reading, and then I think aloud as I wrestle with them in front of the class.
So many other issues/questions come into play here:
Why do strong readers live with ambiguity longer than poor readers? And how do we teach students to embrace confusion long enough for meaning to occur?
I differ on your re-read take. I think sometimes when I re-read it does cause me to think differently. The very act itself spurs different thinking. Sometimes the first draft reading helps me to get the lay of the land, and the 2nd draft read helps me to focus where I need to really slow down and think. Sometimes re-reading alone increases my comprehension—though I agree that it should often be paired with some sort of strategic approach (often derived from what is actually being read)—especially with struggling readers.
My students who have the most trouble reading the hard stuff are the same students who haven’t read much of the easy stuff. Where does volume come into play with the capacity to tackle difficult text? And why does the CCSS virtually ignore volume? If students do not read a lot, their chances of making sense of difficult text diminish. Lots of issues here with students’ lack of prior knowledge as well.
Also, a somewhat unrelated side note: I think somewhere along the road the essential skill of summary has been put on the back burner in many classrooms. Students need more practice learning how to summarize, and teachers need to model how to summarize (as opposed to paraphrasing). Students should be summarizing printed text as well as digital text (YouTube, etc). When you have a student explain his summary, you learn a lot about the child’s deficits.
Thanks for your thoughtful post. Have to run. Maybe more later…
Kelly: great thoughts. Totally agree on the discipline/formative assessment of summarize. But that’s what’s interesting to me as process: what are they doing when they TRY to summarize? Agree on volume but it can’t be sufficient. There are plenty of “readers” who don’t comprehend hard stuff. And finally – YOU may “re-read” differently, but I think, in general, kids do not. In fact that is just the kind of data we need more of: who does what when ‘re-reading’ – do they read at the same pace? Do they do something other than just re-read? – and how can we more quickly diagnose problematic re-reading (and summarizing)? Thanks, friend!
I plan to plug Deeper Reading in the recommendation posts 🙂
I’m always reading about how other countries outs ore American kids on standardized tests. Is this true of reading comprehension? If so, how do they teach reading comprehension?
Not much difference across the countries – far less than in math. Gender plays a huge role: from the PISA report: “Girls outperform boys in reading almost everywhere. This gender gap is particularly large in some high-performing countries, where almost all underperformance in reading is seen only among boys.
Guess which country has a VAST disparity? FINLAND!!
Low-performing boys face a particularly large disadvantage as they are heavily over-represented among those who fail to show basic levels of reading literacy. These low levels of performance tend to be coupled with low levels of engagement with school and – as observed in PISA 2009 – with low levels of engagement with and commitment to reading. To close the gender gap in reading performance, policy makers need to promote boys’ engagement with reading and ensure that more boys begin to show the basic level of proficiency that will allow them to participate fully and productively in life.”
My wife teaches reading to urban students in inner city Cleveland. Many students are ELL. She has found a wonderful program that really helps students become fluent, skilled readers who make the challenging leap from decoding to reading for meaning in less than a year–even when they start three or four grades behind grade level. The program is called ReadRight. At first, when I heard about their strategy, I thought it was doomed to fail. ReadRight emphasizes fluency in reading aloud without errors. Teachers model “excellent reading” for students by reading real stories with them–not artificially constructed primers–and then, working with small groups of four or five students, they take turns reading paragraphs aloud. After each attempt, they indicate whether they judge the excellence of their reading. The students internalize the standard of perfect vocalization. The success of this approach indicates to me that too much reading instruction rushes into subvocalization too soon. Young readers need to learn to both hear and read aloud language with expressivity. Getting that “performing voice” into your own brain is crucial–and many readers are pushed forward before they have developed it. In many cases, they never do. For them, “reading” is a mechanical process with no feeling or curiosity attached to it. It is just done on command , with no genuine purpose besides satisfying an external demand. No wonder, then, that when reading gets really challenging–e.g., Immanuel Kant’s Critique–they are utterly lost and have no idea where to begin to make meaning. When I read carefully, I always assume a tone of voice , speech rhythm, inflection, and even volume. In short, I hear–and articulate–a “voice”–in my mind’s ear. I believe it is the ability to do this–after years of practice–that separates skilled from unskilled readers. An inestimable advantage of this approach is that it takes reading out of the silence of one’s inner consciousness and into the hearing of others, where it can be heard and understood by others. It’s not a flawless strategy, but I have seen it work wonders and turn virtual non-readers into kids who love reading. And while we’re at it, let’s bring back poetry memorization and recital, too. We have become so enthralled with digital technology that we have forgotten the fundamental magic of the sound of the performing human voice. Check out ReadRight. They’re really on to something: http://www.readright.com/
David, thanks for sharing this. It makes sense on the sound of it (so to speak): I often edit my writing by reading it out loud and I think there is a connection to your point. At the very least, it makes the inaudible audible which is surely a start at determining what is going on in the black box. The model and comparison to it in self-assessment also seems like a very important piece of feedback. (Feedback is often missing when people read by themselves, obviously). I’ll check it out! Thanks to your wife, too!
Check out “When We Read, We Recognize Words as Pictures and Hear Them Spoken Aloud” in Scientific American!
Grant– as a teacher of philosophy, your example was fantastic! It took majoring in philosophy and teaching it for four years before I could understand that passage and even now, it takes 100% attention…
What you say here seems to be true beyond reproach. I think back to my struggles as a reader in youth and remember I was told that I needed to learn to read faster… it never happened. I always slowed down and got mired in definitions of words, interpretations; I wanted to think through everything and have conversations with people over what I was reading. It took exposure to philosophy to finally find something where slow reading and conversation were valued.
What I like most about your post is the point that it is THINKING that we need to be teaching, more so than reading. Words on a page are springboards for thought. So what if we started calling reading passages “Thinking prompts”. Change the marketing…
thanks for the post
You are onto where I am headed: it is a ‘thinking’ issue. That becomes much clearer when you see how comprehension strategies are taught by typical teachers, to be discussed in later posts.
Love it: read faster! That’s right up there with: think harder!
Reblogged this on A Teaching Life and commented:
Brilliant post about reading comprehension from Grant Wiggins:
Thank you, Grant, for this post. What good food for thought. I have to think that the struggle we’re seeing with older students’ reading stems from the way reading is taught at the beginning. We need to be reading aloud to children from the beginning, modeling fluent speech like David mentions with ReadRight, but also choral reading with children, reading poetry, reciting rhymes, providing compelling reading, discussing reading, thinking aloud about reading, giving children a broad choice of reading, and encouraging children’s creative writing. Reading needs to be fun from the start, yet I fear that the push to get younger and younger children “reading” has made reading a chore to get through for so many.
As Lynn said above, good readers intend and desire to understand what they read, so don’t young readers need experiences enjoying reading and having it discussed with them to build that desire? And as many of your commenters have said, there are specific lessons that can be done with older students to prevent Kayla’s strategy – “I keep reading and hope it makes sense when I’m done.” All this reading takes time, though. And that is one thing teachers no longer have.
Also, none of this happens in a vacuum. There is such competition for our attention now! I grew up in a house full of books and magazines, where reading and conversation were valued and TV time was minimal. Books were there to share or pull off shelves and browse through, to read, put back, or add to the stack by the bed. I wouldn’t have read half the books I did if I’d had to order them to my e-book. I read the paper online and recognize that online reading is different – it requires different kinds of attention and discernment. Throw into the mess how busy our kids are and all the smart phones, tablets, and video games that vie for their attention and is there any wonder that “re-reading is a waste of time?”
I agree with much of what you say about a good initial experience, Leslie, but that finesses the question of the data (it is not a recent problem) and why becoming a better reader (not just a willing reader) is so hard to cause. In other words, you are close to making it sound like “willing” readers just become “skilled” readers. But that begs the question: how? Why do some become skilled and others do not? What are some readers doing that is more effective than what other readers are doing? It can’t be just about eagerness. I nearly left graduate school over the difficulty of reading that Kant though I was an eager reader by then. Very few of the comments here get at my question: what, actually, are readers doing in the face of challenges? What determines success or lack of success in facing reading challenges? Are all comprehension deficits the same? Do we sufficiently understand the deficits or dead ends? etc. Even the commenters are jumping too quickly to advice in most cases – without explaining precisely what the problems are.
You’re right. We want to fix the problem, so are tossing our advice on the pile. That said, I do think that being “willing” does allow one to become “skilled.” Would Kyla just toss off her lack of understanding if she cared about what she was reading? If I want to fix my thermostat, but don’t understand how, I’m going to read the manual, fiddle with the thing, re-read the manual, watch a youtube video, and call in help to make sure I understand and don’t have another astronomical electric bill. So my willingness, with practice, and practical application (experience?), allows me to come to understanding and become a more skilled thermostat user.
That doesn’t diminish your questions, though. But was your difficulty reading Kant, despite eagerness, a good test? Who wouldn’t have difficulty? Reminds me of Art History class and asking us what the artist was trying to express. Who knows without asking the artist? Is everything meant to be understood the same way?
I think the eagerness keeps you willing to persist in the face of difficulty. My point was different: eagerness, alone, will not solve the problem of the lack of comprehension. I think the Barnhouse & Vinton text is very wise on this: many of the tactics we use do not get beyond superficial readings; and many students do not possess tactics for how to “go deeper” except glib generic advice like “re-read” or “visualize” which, when you think about it, finesses the question of how to grapple with confusing text.
“Who wouldn’t have difficulty?” That’s the point! All our students have the same experience when reading challenging non-fiction. And we, as of yet, do not fully understand that difficulty – that’s my point.
I am of course with you on Kyla’s blowing off the inability to comprehend. That story shows that there need to be more incentives to persist, for sure. But persistence, by itself, does not improve comprehension. “Try harder! Keep at it!” won’t make you a more discerning reader – even if it is you admonishing yourself.
Your last rhetorical question gets to the nub of the problem: many teachers are loathe to criticize a student’s reading of a text. This is a terrible mistake. I used to say to my kids: “you need to understand one thing and one thing only to succeed in this class. There are no right and final answers to any question about meaning of text. HOWEVER, some answers are far better than others – and your job is to understand how both sentences can be true at the same time, and to learn how to come up with ‘far better’ meanings.” (This is the nub of the focus on argument in the common core).
What are the implications of this line of thinking about reading comprehension on evaluating teachers based on state test scores?
Short answer: I have no idea. Longer answer: it could be considerable – if it turns out, for example, that MS and HS teachers could be making a significant improvement in comprehension but are not. But we need more work on how to research what readers are doing as they “read” in the upper grades.
In many ways this is why RTI doesn’t necessarily work for reading. You can’t isolate a reading skill and test it every six weeks. Lots of wasted money.
I consider myself a successful reader, but even while studying for my masters in teaching, I loved hearing and sharing what others got from the texts, and I was continually seeing the material with new understanding and new eyes.
To respond to your request:
(I read the material, and thought about what I was actually doing as I read.) I read the first sentence -first slowly, then in its entirety, and then as it would be spoken in a way that made sense grammatically. I had to do this with several sentences. I looked for comma cues, which were somewhat lacking. I thought about how the words made sense once I read them with correct emphasis. Here is an example: the second and third sentences, “knowledge antecedent” would appear to have “knowledge” modifying “antecedent” (a type of knowledge) yet upon closer reading, “antecedent” is the verb. Rereading produces an understanding of his premise: he is going to talk about knowledge, how it is acquired, or what kind of knowledge…. As I read further, I reached a place where I started glazing over – I had to stop and read each word individually, thinking about the word meanings, clues on whether they were being used as verbs, adjectives, adverbs; I had to decide from previous context what that sentence meant. I read it several different ways, that is, I changed the emphasis on words until I found the way the sentence made sense. In this particular place, one word jumped out. I had to think about what it meant, what it meant in relation to the words around it, and which meaning was most likely given what the author was saying. I also held those possibilities in my head to keep or reject as I read further. The final paragraph presented a challenge with “every alteration has its cause” and the subsequent sentences. I know alteration as a sewing term, or as a change of some kind. What did he mean? I had to think about this sentence and it’s multiple meanings. I found myself emphasizing different words in the phrase to comb it for meaning. I read the words after and then read it again. I found myself with a fragile understanding of what I thought it meant. I had to go back and re-read the text right before. I believe I now understand what the passage is directing us toward.
Your directing questions helped – but I would not have wanted to read them first. My mind would not have been open to all the stimulus. I might have missed an original possibility, and would have accepted without thought, your understanding (something our kids do all the time!)
I helped my son learn comprehension reading as he worked on his GED. I had him read each sentence and then question it. I had him turn sentences into questions and see if further sentences answered his question. We would talk about what words mean, how to emphasize different words, and how that changed meaning. I taught him to look at clues around the word he didn’t know, which created another question. If he asked me what a sentence was trying to say, I would ask him about what had been going on before the sentence. What was the author proposing and did the sentence he questioned “make sense in light of the other things the author said?” I am not a lit teacher. I teach math. I love to read, however, and I consider challenging texts interesting. It takes a lot of cognitive attention to read those challenging texts, and I honed my skills reading lots of books. I have noticed my students rarely read. They are typing thoughts constantly, reading tweets and quick chats, instagrams — I believe there is a connection there that would allow us to reach and improve reading skills, if we recognize what they currently do, and how they build meaning from those things.
Interesting! This so much back and forth – and the willingness to do so – is, I think, key to success or failure in reading. I agree with you about the directing questions. I initially put them first, then edited them to afterwards. Nor did I intend all those questions to be used, really. (I should have made that point more clearly). I kept all the questions because they were suggestive of the absence of knowledge we have about what readers do when they read.
Interesting that you were hung up on “alteration”. In other words, all changes have causes. While that sounds like a DUH it is a central idea in the text because Kant is explicitly responding to Hume thru the Critique. Hume argued that we come to expect “effects” from “causes” by habit, not by necessity. So, the IDEA of cause and effect is just a habit to Hume. Ti Kant it is an intellectual a priori truth; it’s how we order reality.
I think it is also a key idea as a teacher. My children change their behavior (knowledge) by some cause. I have made them curious, for example. The word alteration was not one I had thought about before in terms of personal change. I would have used change. Alteration is a better choice because it parses very finely what actually happens when we change. We alter our belief, or our behavior, or our knowledge/understanding of a thing through either experience or education (the “cause”).
Back to the text: So Kant says that we already know of this before we experience/learn thru cause and effect? And Hume says we learn it thru habituation of receiving consequences for each of our actions?
Kant’s argument is tricky: he says in the passage just after I left off that a key criterion for any a priori knowledge is that the mind grasps its necessity as an idea. He cites geometric proof (and logic, more generally) as a key example that such ideas exist. He is thus saying that Hume cannot be right about core concepts: the concept that any experience has a cause (or more) is a key way the mind orders its experience. If we learned the idea of cause and effect just thru experience than the idea ITSELF would be “contingent” and “not necessary”. “Well, that’s just YOUR experience. In my experience, things just happen…” No, for Kant the idea itself HAS necessity for us; it is a category of pure reason (i.e. how mind works). We cannot think of an “alteration” not having a cause. The harder part to understand is that Kant is NOT saying that this sentence is true by definition. The next idea discussed in the intro is the distinction between “synthetic” and “analytic” truths. But that’s another confusing passage!
I don’t know if this addresses the issue you’re getting at, but in my last few years as a high school English teacher, I developed a theory that the reason many students struggled with, say, Shakespeare, was that they simply read through passages once, in a “linear” (left-to-right, then down to the beginning of the next line) fashion, without slowing down. Good readers, on the other hand, pause, backtrack (a little, a lot), jump back and forth, and try to find major seams of meaning on which the mind can hammer pitons as it ascends the mountain of the text. (Not the most elegant metaphor, but that’s what comes to mind.)
The problem of “linear” reading is exacerbated by advice (“annotate or highlight key words”) or what I consider sequences of arbitrary questions teachers ask on typical worksheets and reading quizzes, during read-alouds, or at the end of a poem, story, essay, or passage in a textbook.
My solution was to apply UbD on a small scale, asking myself, “For any given text, what sequence of questions would collectively generate evidence that a student ‘understands’ or ‘gets’ the big idea(s) of a text?” I would then give passages and corresponding questions (often placed on the margin alongside the relevant line(s) of text) to students to use as formative and summative assessments. The idea was to design questions such that, by answering the questions, students would “teach” themselves how to read the text (and by extension, eventually recognize after reading several texts this way that readers slow down to answer imagined questions along the way). They also served as confidence-boosters for my less-confident readers, with whom I had some success when I taught Shakespeare using this approach. Well-designed questions, therefore, act as the metaphorical pitons to the reader-climber.
Here’s a first crack at some questions I might ask of first paragraph of the Kant passage if I were teaching it in class:
1. Where, according to Kant, does all of our knowledge begin?
2. What are the three steps of the process by which “objects affecting our senses” awaken “our faculty of knowledge?”
3. Which of the following definitions of “sensible” best fits the meaning of the word as it is used in the second sentence of paragraph 1? (Hint: Which word that appears earlier in the paragraph has the same root?) a) prudent, b) practical, c) perceivable
4. Define “antecedent.”
5. Provide an illustration for each of the three steps.
I may be wrong, but I think that if a student could answer all of these questions, then this correlates with “getting” the first paragraph of the passage.
I’m happy to email you some examples of how I’ve crafted such question-sequences. I’m sure my theory has holes (for instance, because the questions are “text-dependent,”* I suspect that there may be inefficiencies in terms of generating transfer, that is, getting students to generate an effective sequence of their own imaginary questions when reading any given text), which I’m happy to be made aware of, but from a practical standpoint, I found some success approaching reading this way.
* I started using this approach in 2009, about a year or two before the Common Core and text-dependent questions came out.
Jose, this is great – just the sort of analysis of problem followed by targeted solution that I had in mind to explore with folks. I agree with your diagnosis – too much left to right linear reading – on top of a lack of purpose to guide the reading. For me the lack of purpose is key: without knowing what questions are to guide the reading i will read relatively random;y. So, your questions seem just right. I would add an overarching essential question: How do we know what we know? What can we know and do we come to know it? In other words, the very big questions that Kant is exploring. That’s how I used to pick EQs with texts: what questions is the author trying to explore through the text? That provides a touchstone for attempts to understand what one is reading.
I would love to see your examples and ponder together with you the transfer aspects.
On the Kant, I realized I:
– Am pausing and checking to see if I agree or disagree with certain statements, such as the first line. I often cannot go on to further reading until I do this and come to a conclusion. I realize now I do this often as I read nonfiction and that I become highly engaged when I really agree or really disagree with a statement, spurring me to read on, alert and excited.
– Am re-reading often, over and over again, trying to translate much of what he says into statements that I can follow and agree or disagree with.
– am hunting for a kind of linkage from one word and idea to the next and I find I can’t understand and move on unless I see it, like a chain revealed — something slowly and painstakingly, sometimes more quickly (e.g. the first line is “easy” for me this way but what follows in that paragraph takes time and re-reading for the chain to appear.)
– am actively translating his complex, obscure descriptions into words and ideas in my own vocabulary — sometimes out loud. This feels similar to translation I have experienced from Spanish (my second language) to English (my mother tongue.)
Fascinating exercise.
Fascinating, Lex! And, I think, a revealing record: We agree/disagree and this both helps and hurts our comprehension attempts. The chain is important – many kids often sonly read material that has no linkage (e.g. textbook pseudo-paragraphs in history). And, yes, there is an active ‘translation’ that has to occur: sometimes it is word substitution; other times, as a reader pointed out, we take out ‘unnecessary’ phrases/clauses to get at the core meaning.
May be you can try getting some of the teachers you coach to get kids to try a similar exercise and/or answer a subset of the questions I posed?
This reminds me of one observation I had about a particularly good math student at college: he could read math textbooks like light novels. So, what did I mean by that?
– In a light novel, there is rarely unfamiliar vocabulary or an unfamiliar usage. You don’t have to put any effort into figuring out what the words mean.
– In a light novel, attention to detail is not critical, so you don’t have to make an effort to attend to detail.
– in a light novel, the objects and actions fit within an established mental model (maybe the “real world”, maybe a fantasy version or a sci-fi alternative reality). You don’t have to work to create that mental model.
In contrast, when I read a math text I usually have to
– understand what the words and symbols mean
– attend closely to detail while always trying to work out which details really matter and which are mere technicalities
– build a mental model of what the objects are, what their properties are, how they interact, how they are similar and different from things which are more familiar, etc.
Particularly when there is no pre-existing mental model, I have to iterate, loop, review some sections, repeatedly to lay out a skeleton, then add and change as I repeat.
In a sense, this is highly analogous to how I interpret the Kant passage: experience offers hints of knowledge, we then work to structure that knowledge, use it to engage with experience (both prior and new), and refine our knowledge. Rinse and repeat.
For me, this offers a clear explanation for why 100 pages of reading in a week could be easy for one student and kill another. For the student with a lot of prior experience and related mental models that can be applied to the texts, the work required to understand 100 pages is a simple compare and contrast. For the student without those models, comprehension requires inventing the structure first.
I can summarize my approach to this passage as this: I spent a great deal of time parsing the sentences, trying to make sure I understood the relationships between the words, phrases, and ideas in each one. This did require a lot of rereading, both of sentences and parts of sentences. Understanding the function of the commas is critical to this effort! I also found myself parsing paragraphs in much the same way, working to understand the relationships between the sentences in order to comprehend the intent of each paragraph and its function in the passage.
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