By Althea Need Kaminske

Perhaps one of the downsides of being a Learning Scientist is my tendency to never teach the same course twice. There are always new methods and approaches, improvements to old methods, and, increasingly, uncertainty about the mode of delivery in my courses. This summer I have been particularly focused on redesigning my upper-level Sensation & Perception course. At the beginning of the summer I went to a workshop focused on “ungrading” - an approach to course design and instruction that decenters summative assessment and centers formative assessment and reflections. There are many different types and levels of “ungrading” (in quotes here because it is not one uniform approach and often teachers are still required to assign grades), but what appealed to me about the various approaches discussed in the workshop was the focus on feedback and reflection. I was somewhat primed to think about alternative ways to provide grades and feedback by reading Carolina’s recent research on mark withholding last spring (1).

In an effort to design a course that would satisfy my learning objectives for the course and to try out an “ungrading” approach, I settled on using primary source articles for the course rather than a textbook. I want students to not only understand some of the basic processes, anatomy, and physiology of sensation and perception, but to also gain a deeper appreciation of psychology as a science. Textbooks provide excellent overviews and summaries of information, but in doing so tend to present research as settled facts, rather than ongoing conversations and investigations. My hope is that by reading the primary source articles students will better understand the process (i.e. the scientific method) that was used to arrive at the information. Reading scientific articles, or anything for that matter, is a skill that takes time and practice to learn. A good textbook will provide a lot of support for developing reading skills (glossaries, indexes, summaries, practice questions, etc.) so by choosing to not use a textbook I’ve lost a lot of support for the student’s reading. So I’ve spent the last few weeks reading about reading to figure out how to bridge this gap for students in my course.

One of the most useful articles I found was “Strategies for improving reading comprehension among students” by Lei, Rhinehart, Howard, and Cho (2010) (2). They outlined seven major strategies for improving reading comprehension among college students: Background Knowledge and Experience, Homework and Class Work, Learning Aides, SQ3R, Peer-Teaching, Encoding, and Reading Flexibility. All of the strategies they review are useful and relevant, but I want to focus specifically on Background Knowledge and Experience, Encoding, and Reading Flexibility. (For an overview of SQ3R check out this post by Cindy). 

Background Knowledge and Experience

Lei and colleagues start their review of reading strategies by discussing the role of lectures in improving reading comprehension. They note that a good lecture improves reading comprehension by improving students’ background knowledge on a topic. “Students can get overwhelmed easily with text-based material. Instructor’s lectures are an overview of important information taken out of the text. They are a direct and precise layout of what they want students to focus on.” (pg 32). In other words, good lectures clearly and explicitly state the main ideas and concepts that students should be taking away from the reading, serving as a primer or guide on the reading. 

This advice lines up well with our understanding of how students summarize texts. While summarizing is often recommended as a tool to help students learn from texts, students often struggle with summarizing because they either lack the skills or the background knowledge to do so (3). As teachers and therefore experts on the topic area and reading within that topic area, we take for granted the skills and expertise required to get the main ideas from a text. Summarizing skills can be taught and improved, but such interventions can be time-consuming (3). Depending on the goals of the course, providing direct instruction on the summary and main ideas of a text may be more effective.

Along with lectures, Lei and colleagues recommend using class discussion as a way to improve students’ background knowledge and experience, and therefore reading comprehension. The focus here seems to be on the beneficial elaborative processes that students engage in during discussion. “Class discussion stimulate students to listen and evaluate the material being discussed, giving them the opportunity to bring up their own thoughts and ideas, which get all students involved in building on each other’s input.” (pg 32). 

A final strategy for improving background knowledge and experience that I found particularly helpful is video instruction. This article was published in 2010, over a decade ago and outside the context of virtual learning due to a global pandemic, so in this context video instruction may be somewhat different than what we think of today. However, they note that “a critical attribute of video is the ability to use both auditory and visual symbol systems … Videos have a precise way of describing what could be confusing or difficult to understand in text alone.” (pg 33, see also 4). As we’ve noted before, videos can be an effective means of delivering instruction, especially when they adhere to best practices. Therefore, the recommendation to use videos to supplement and improve comprehension of assigned texts seems pretty solid. 

How I Plan to Implement These Strategies

In my class I’ll be applying all of these strategies to help students understand the reading. I’ve set up a weekly schedule such that Mondays are review and preview day. The first half of the class will be devoted to Think, Pair, Share activities where students will be put into small groups to discuss topics covered in the previous week’s readings, thereby leveraging class discussions to help students elaborate on their understanding of the texts. The second half of the class will focus on previewing the topics covered in that week’s reading providing a guide of main ideas, key terms, and questions for students to keep in mind as they tackle that week’s readings. Finally, for the trickier readings I have also assigned short instructional videos for students to watch. For my purposes, I cannot say enough good things about the Crash Course video series in Anatomy and Physiology and Psychology. They provide excellent overviews of material that I know my students have encountered before (like the structure of the eye) but could use a refresher on before they read an academic article that assumes a greater familiarity with that material. 

Encoding

As a memory researcher I was obviously interested in what reading strategies would leverage encoding to improve reading comprehension. My main area of expertise is in human learning and memory which does occasionally brush up with research on reading comprehension, but they tend to be separate fields. So I was excited to see some very familiar terms and strategies in this section.

The two main strategies that Lei and colleagues recommend here are outlining and concept mapping. Both really achieve the same purpose which is to help students organize and elaborate on their understanding of the material. They note that “the use of an outline presents the visual organization of a textbook that function to prepare readers for identification of major topics and relevant information within the text … The outline serves as a guide for facilitating information retrieval by providing specific cues that are applied during the learning experience” (pg 38). The authors recommend providing skeletons of outlines that students fill out with notes and other information to connect the outline to the text (5). 

Similar to outlines, concept maps also provide a visual organization of information. Based on the authors’ description of concept mapping, the benefit to reading comprehension seems to come from the process of creating the concept map - identifying the concepts, the links among concepts, and the hierarchy of concepts - rather than the concept map itself per se. In other words, to receive a benefit of concept mapping students need to create the concept map and not just be given the concept map. The authors also note that some students need instruction and practice with concept mapping before getting a benefit from them. Their discussion of concept mapping seems similar to what Megan has discussed with retrieval mapping. 

How I Plan to Implement These Strategies

In thinking about how to use these encoding strategies in my upper-level course I’ve settled on including outlining as an additional learning opportunity. In the “ungrading” approach I’m using, students will have to create Learning Portfolios throughout the semester to demonstrate their learning. There are a few required elements to the Learning Portfolio - indicating that they have read or watched all of the assigned material and submitting all required papers - but there are optional, additional learning opportunities that they may include in their portfolio to make the case for a higher grade. Creating detailed outlines are a great way to improve their reading comprehension and to demonstrate how they have worked to improve their understanding of course material.

Reading Flexibility

Reading flexibility was the shortest section in Lei et al.’s review paper, but I found it to be the most interesting strategy. Lei and colleagues stress that “Students must learn to adjust their speed and style of reading to their reading objectives and the type of materials to be read… Some reading materials can be scanned, skimmed through, and read lightly, while others must [be] read closely and critically” (pg 40). 

Students are often shocked when I tell them NOT to read something closely. While I appreciate the default assumption that everything assigned is important and therefore deserves close and critical reading, it’s simply not practical nor is it reflective of how experts in the area read. In searching for articles on reading strategies I did not read the entirety of every article I encountered in order to determine if it was useful to me. Instead, there are several decision points I used to decide whether an article was useful for my purposes and whether I should continue to read it. Many were rejected on the basis of the title alone. If the article had a title that seemed like what I was looking for then I read the abstract. Again more were rejected at that stage. If the title and abstract looked good then I skimmed the article - generally reading a few paragraphs in the introduction to see if the background information and questions explored would line up with my interests, then skimming the methods to see which population was studied (I’m an instructor at an American University teaching young adults whose first language is primarily English), and finally jumping ahead to the conclusion to review the main takeaways. Only after doing that with several articles did I read an article critically - i.e. highlighting key points, noting connections in the margins and even looking up some of the cited papers. 

How I Plan to Implement These Strategies

From talking with my students this does not seem to be the approach they use. They sit down to read papers from start to finish, taking away what they can never to return again. The idea that you can read at different levels for different goals is somewhat novel. I plan to discuss reading flexibility with my students several times throughout the course. First, I’ll need to introduce the idea of skim vs critical reading noting that there are specific strategies to skim reading academic articles. Next, we’ll need to talk about skim reading as the first step in critical reading. Getting the big picture of a text to help guide you through a subsequent closer read. This seems like a natural point to start building an outline of a paper if students choose to do that as an additional learning activity. Finally, the notes and highlights you make while reading will depend on what you are trying to understand from the paper. For every reading I’ve included 2 or 3 guiding questions to help students read the papers more critically. 

Taken together, I found the strategies recommended by Lei et al. (2010) very helpful in preparing for my course this semester. I hope that providing some examples and discussion of my own course design process is helpful to others who are going through the same process as the fall semester is about to start.

References

(1) Kuepper-Tetzel, C. E., & Gardner, P. L. (2021). Effects of temporary mark withholding on academic performance. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 1475725721999958.

(2) Lei, S. A., Rhinehart, P. J., Howard, H. A., & Cho, J. K. (2010) Strategies for improving reading comprehension among college students. Reading Improvement, 47 (1), 30-42.

(3) Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58. DOI: 10.1177/1529100612453266

(4) Choi, H. J., & Johnson, S. D. (2005). The effect of context-based video instruction on learning and motivation in online courses. British Journal of Education Technology, 19(4), 215-227.

(5 )Glynn, S., & DiVesta, F. (1977). Outline and hierarchical organization as aids for study and retrieval. Journal of Educational Psychology, 69(2), 89-95.