Study Tip #2
READING TO UNDERSTAND

Outline of Reading to Understand: 

1.  Understanding builds associatons and memory.
2.  Preview chapters.
3.  First reading: Read for the meaning and to find and mark what is important.
4.  Read things twice.
5.  Second reading: deal with difficult passages.
6.  Second reading: Plug ideas into mental frameworks.
7.  Second reading: Translate the words into other mental representations.
8.  Second reading: Break large chunks into small chunks. Group small chunks together into larger chunks.
9.  Second reading: Pull together the five aspects of definitions of concepts.
10. Second reading: Track sets of concepts and examples.

Understanding builds associations and memory.

People normally will remember ideas better when they understand them than when they don’t because to under-stand means to associate an idea and its meanings together. So any methods you use to understand what you read will improve your learning. Using a method of getting understanding takes more reading and thinking time at first, but it pays you back later with better memory. If you do not have much time to use the techniques de-scribed below and need just one method, then pay close attention to the meaning of what you read. Attention is vital.

Preview chapters.

Search for information that tells you a lot about what you will find in the chapter. Try to find these things: the learning goals; the topics discussed; some of the concepts and theories; the claims the author makes; and the overall structure.

• Good material can be found in introductions, summaries, boldface headings, and topic sentences. Do not read everything, instead hunt for the high points, the big ideas.
• Doing previews before you read will give you an early framework to associate the detailed ideas with as you read. You probably will not be able to keep the framework consciously in mind while you read for the first time because it is all too new for you. But it will boost understanding and memory. Any little bit helps.
• Don’t make the mistake of doing previews too fast because high speed scanning does not give you enough time to notice the meanings that come to mind as you preview. When you find a big idea, pause and think over its meanings.

First reading: Read for the meaning and to find and mark what is important.

• Set one goal during your first reading: to understand the meaning. Notice what the sentences mean. When time is short, do not set only the goal of getting through the material quickly, because then you will sacrifice meaning and waste your own time.
• If you cannot get it the first time, mark a ? in the margin so that you can return to it later.
• Set a second goal to find and mark important things. Why? To save time reviewing. When you come back to study a book, you can save hours of reading time by going right to the passages you marked and studying them.
• Pay attention as you read. When your mind wanders, bring it back to the subject a few words before where you were when your attention shifted. Reason: Our attention is needed for our minds to activate and notice the meanings of words, phrases and sentences. Our attention adds force to learning, improves memory, and saves study time.
• Choose a speed of reading that is slow enough for you to notice the meanings coming into your conscious mind. When you notice that you did not know exactly what something meant, slow down and repeat read-ing it. To consciously remember the meaning later you need to consciously pay attention when you read it.
• You will be associating the words on the page with your own mental images and knowledge and with what you recall from your preview.
• Pause for a second at the end of a complex sentence, paragraph, or section and notice the overall meaning a little longer. Most people don’t stop. Understanding grows with little pauses because your mind pulls separated ideas together.
• When your author provides diagrams, charts, graphs, tables, and illustrations, set your goal to understand them, too, by figuring out what they mean. When a graphic relates to principles or facts described in the text, pay conscious attention to how each verbal part of the written information relates to each visual part of the graphic. Doing so will build your memory.

Read things twice. 

You will get many benefits by reading and studying material two or more times. If you have never done it, I recommend you experiment with it and notice the changes in your understanding and memory.

• Bad things happen to memory when we read textbooks just once. Since we usually find that texts have rea-sonably new and complex ideas, we only understand some of them on our first reading. We miss many pat-terns and links among ideas. But our reading a second time permits us to see the author’s structure.
• When we read the first time, it can be hard enough to figure out the words and the intended meaning of the author. Our working memory doesn’t have enough “mental space” to also notice how details fit into big ideas. But on the second reading, now that we understand simple meanings, it gets easier to see more com-plex meanings and see parts grouped in various ways.
• Try to do your second reading within a day or two. If you delay too long, the strength of your associations will have weakened, and you’ll forget too much and have to reteach yourself things.

Second reading: deal with difficult passages. 

There are several special techniques you can use to clear up difficult passages. 

• Find the kinds of information that lack meaning to you because they are usually more difficult than oth-ers.
• Examples are symbols, numbers, new words, foreign words, people’s names, and facts that seem arbitrary with no apparent explanation. They are difficult because when the author uses a symbol or name the next time, you may have already forgotten it and that will make it harder to understand the passage.
• Mark or take notes on low-meaning material.
• You may want to prevent difficulty by memorizing low-meaning material soon after you read it so that you can follow the book. If you cannot write it down, make notes and keep them with you as read later ma-terial that uses earlier material. By learning vocabulary you will be able to make associations more easily to later passages that uses those words. The same goes for numbers, names and arbitrary facts.
• Make self-explanations on any passages you find complex and difficult. Your goal is make your mental model match up with the author’s mental model. Go line by line and talk to yourself about what it means. Try to think of what the section means in terms of what you already know. If the author says something that seems not to make sense, then keep working at it.

Second reading: Plug ideas into mental frameworks. 

A mental framework is a “big idea”, a set of general ideas that applies to a lot of specific information. Associ-ate bits of new information to sets of big ideas by consciously noticing how the new ideas fit into them.

• Keep the frameworks consciously in your mind on your second reading, and figure out how other facts and ideas fit into them. As you do, your understanding will grow.
• Use the author’s frameworks.
• Use common general frameworks.
  • Time – before and after.
  • Space – locations and relationships.
  • An object and its description.
  • A whole thing – parts and organization.
  • Causes and effects.
  • Means and goals.
  • Concepts and their relationships.
• Go outside the boundaries of sentences to organize ideas into frameworks. You will have to link ideas and concepts that occur over gaps of several sentences or even several pages. For example, sometimes a cause is discussed in one sentence, and its effect in a later sentence. Or a whole and its parts will cover pages and pages. You must catch such a spread of ideas.

Second reading: Translate the words into other mental representations.

A representation means the way your mind makes images of the information—visual, auditory, kinesthetic, sto-ries, analogies, languages, etc. When you add one or two more representations to the original words, your un-derstanding will get deeper because you are associating two representations together.

• Visual representations: Turn the sentences into mental pictures of objects and their locations and move-ments.
• Auditory representations: (1) Imagine how events described in the passage sounded, what noises there were. (2) Imagine hearing the passage read aloud to you in the voice of someone you know. Imagine their intonation and rhythms. Why do this? When silent reading doesn’t seem to make sense, hearing it often does. And, oddly, people who can imagine hearing a familiar voice reading it can improve their understand-ing.
• Kinesthetic representations: Imagine going through the movements involved as if you were living through a process or events. One electronics major puzzled by a circuit diagram imagined he was an electron going through the circuit, and suddenly he understood it. Math majors move their hands to mimic curves on graphs. Many people imagine how things feel to the touch. Athletes often find that they learn abstract in-formation better when they turn it into kinesthetic representations. Their understanding improves.
• Stories and personal experiences: Take information and make up stories that put the ideas together. For example, student nurses can read about a disease and its treatment and make up a story about working with a friend who is sick.

Second reading: Break large chunks into small chunks. Group small chunks together into larger chunks. 

Although in relaxed reading we accept the phrases and sentences an author gives us as being the natural chunks, we can often do better than the author in breaking up the chunks and give ourselves better understanding. Each time you create new chunks, you create new ways to associate the parts of the information to each other.

• Break complex sentences into short simple chunks. Try to understand one part, then another part and a third. Finally, put them together.
• Assemble chunks together into larger patterns and try to understand the larger pattern.
• Play with chunks in various representations: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and stories.
• Play with chunks in the common general frameworks mentioned earlier.

Second reading: Pull together the five aspects of definitions of concepts. 

When authors define new concepts, they often spread five things over several paragraphs. They are: the word itself, its verbal meaning, some positive examples, negative examples, and prototype examples. Science texts often add measurement. 

• The verbal meaning is normally what we mean by “definition”, and it is often abstract.
• A positive example is a specific instance of the concept. A positive example of a mammal is a cow. Often writers will give several positive examples of a concept in order to help students apply the idea to the full range of phenomena that the concept and its word refer to. Thus authors will point out other mammals like whales and kangaroos (yes, marsupials are mammals).
• Negative examples are instances that don’t fit into the concept but might be confused with it. Take the con-cept of birds. We think of flying things but negative examples of birds are bats, flies and wasps.
• Prototype examples are useful typical examples of the concept and are especially helpful to memorize in visual form to help recall the concept. When stuck for a definition one recalls a prototype. For example, one math teacher taught his students a prototype problem of percentage calculations, so that if they were stuck later, they could recall the prototype and use it as a model to figure out the new problem.
• Measurement means the units like mass, velocity, size, birth rates, growth rates.

When you learn new words and study them, gather together all these aspects of new concepts and watch your memory grow.  

Second reading: Track sets of related concepts and examples.

Most authors spread out their discussions of related concepts over several pages. Ideas that are spread out are sometimes hard to make associations between because we may not to notice how they are linked. Therefore, trace them and see their relationships. 

For example, imagine an article about birth rates of deer in a certain environment. “Birth rate” is a concept. One doe’s act of giving birth is a part of the idea. All the births in a year for all deer in an area are also part of the idea. The number of births per thousand deer in a year is a birth rate. Then the rates over several years can be listed in a table. A graph can be made of birth rates. Finally, a formula linking birth rates to population size might be presented. You would find such information spread over many pages. By gathering it together, you will understand it better.

(Dan Hodges. 7/07)

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