Study Tip #23
SCIENCE: READING A TEXT CHAPTER FOR THE FIRST TIME

Outline:

1. The problems in studying science that study methods must deal with.
2. The basics: build understanding, associations and firmness.
3. On your first reading of a chapter, work to understand it.
4. Make notes on forgettable concepts and facts that will be used later.
5. After reading sections, do little mental reviews and self-tests.
6. Take advantage of making easy associations.

The problems in studying science that study methods must deal with.
Although most students know that science courses contain a lot of new material, they are not aware of other traits of science that make it hard to understand and hard to create useful associations. Here are a few traits:

• Science courses introduce many facts and ideas that are intrinsically hard for the human mind to remember because they are not very meaningful. Examples include technical vocabulary, numbers, symbols, formulas, facts that come with no context, and names. Students may read a new word on one page and understand it while it is fresh in their memory, but when they meet it after a couple pages and several minutes have passed, they may have forgotten it and be unable to understand both it and the sentence and paragraph it is written in. Certainly, students encounter many familiar ideas in their science courses, but the amount of information that is meaningful at first glance is often low in science courses.
• Scientific ideas can be complex, contain multiple parts, spell out chains of linked ideas, and state exceptions to generalizations. Complex ideas can be both hard to understand and hard to remember. Complexity requires paying careful attention and making many distinctions.
• Science learning tasks often require learning skills by practicing; skills cannot simply be memorized.
  Usually, students find they need to read a science text and study their notes more than once. How can students learn accurately during their first reading of text chapter and build memory as fast as possible? How many study activities should be crammed into their first reading? What activities waste time? What activities are useful? I think the answer is to keep it simple on your first reading. Save the formal study methods for your second and later contacts with the text. What this Study Tip on studying science contains is advice on how to understand a science text more quickly and how to make associations even during your first reading of a chapter. Later study tips on science will discuss how to reread and study science texts and lecture notes.

The basics: build understanding, associations and firmness.
Many of the other Study Tips in this series stress that to learn knowledge is to get a clear understanding of it, to build associations to it, and to make firm the understanding and the associations. I will assume that you are familiar with basic ways to learn and build memory: the roles of setting specific learning goals and paying attention, the distinction between learning explict knowledge versus building up skill in doing procedures, the many ways to make associations to new knowledge, how to practice and give yourself useful self-tests, and how to retrieve information from memory. If you need a refresher, check the other study tips. This study tip will focus on what works well for science studying.

On your first reading of chapter, work to understand it.
Set your goal to understand what the writer is saying. The reason is that complex writing in science makes un-derstanding harder to get, and understanding ideas first is a prerequisite for learning and using information. Be aware that when you read, retrieve the meanings of words, and figure out the meanings of phrases and sentences, you are building useful associations already. You will build even higher-levels of associations when you read and study passages later.
Try to understand the following things during the first reading:

• Words. Be very careful to understand words. Each blurred word blurs an idea and spreads its damage to any sentences that use it.
• Sentences. Each sentence expresses basic relationships among ideas expressed in words and phrases. If you cannot understand certain sentences, you will miss parts of descriptions, explanations, and scientific reasoning.
• Paragraphs and higher levels of structure. Often it takes a lot of writing for a scientist to fully describe and explain natural phenomena, and it is useful to understand as much of these larger units as you can.

I recommend that you mostly read to understand the first time. Why? You will probably find you lack the “mental space” to add other learning tasks because it takes all your mental energy to work out what the author is saying. You won’t be able to detach your attention from your reading to classify parts of the material or to relate one part to the overall structure. If you did, you’d forget what you were reading about. If you try to use meth-ods like SQ3R (survey, question, read, recite, review) on your first reading, the sheer amount of time it takes will interfere with your ability to understand the text. I recommend you read carefully with attention and work to understand the meaning of what the author is saying. When you don’t understand, use various methods de-scribed in Study Tip #2 to try to get understanding and/or mark the passage with a big question mark to remind yourself to go back later and try again.

Make notes on forgettable concepts and facts that will be used later.
If you make a helpful list of critical new vocabulary and brief definitions, you can quickly review the meanings of later sentences using those words. As you read the chapter, write a list of words on a paper kept right beside you as you read. You can also put on your list the page where the definition occurs. Such a list made on the fly as you read lessens the forgetting problems caused by lots of new vocabulary. Since so much understanding comes in science via words, a little word list lets you meet the word later, recognize that you have forgotten it, and quickly look over to your list and remind yourself of it.

Certain facts in science can be critical to your understanding, and, sadly, they can be forgettable. A little list of such facts made on the fly as you read early parts of a chapter can be used to clarify later parts of a chapter. If it takes too long to write the fact down, just name the fact (“the table of planet Jupiter’s properties”) and the page it is given.

What if you cannot guess in advance whether a certain word or fact will be useful later? That happens all the time. Deal with it the very first time you run into the word or fact again and cannot recall its meaning. Look back, find the page, and this time jot down the definition or the page it occurs on, and read on. It will slow you down if you read passages using words defined earlier that you have forgotten and just read on. Your lack of understanding will make you inaccurate and prevent you from forming natural associations.

After reading sections, do little mental reviews and self-tests.
Imagine you are reading a few paragraphs on a topic and you come to the end of a section. You stop, look away and think, “I wonder how well I can say what this passage said.” Then you try to recall as much as possible. When done, you quickly scan the passage and notice what you got right, what you got wrong, and what you omitted completely (the most common happening). If you wish, you can redo your mental recitation and put in the corrections.

Such little reviews can be done during your first reading and they will boost memory. They are never enough to prepare fully for an exam, but they can cut down the study time you need because the reviews are done while the information is fresh in your mind. They boost your accuracy. And they also build associations through your episodic memory, i.e. your memory for things that occurred in a sequence. Episodic memory is a fundamental property of human memory, and this method takes advantage of it.

Take advantage of making easy associations.
When the textbook presents easy associations, take advantage of them during your first reading at the time they are fresh in your working memory. Four examples of easy associations found in science texts are these:

• Some text about a subject accompanied by a graphic—a picture, diagram, or chart.
• An familiar analogy accompanied by the technical explanation.
• A formal description of a subject followed by a concrete example, story, or evidence.
• A verbal statement of a relationship matched with a math formula to express it.

Science texts will help you make easy associations because they constantly pair new information with one or more additional ways of saying it or representing it. Take advantage of them by pausing in your reading to look back and forth from one of the pair to the other and back again. In your mind notice how each of the pair translates into the other representation. For example, notice how words translate into the parts of a diagram; notice how the elements of an analogy map onto the parts of the technical explanation; notice how the parts of a formal description are represented in an example, story or evidence; and notice how the symbols in the formula and the words match each other. By doing this back and forth translation you will literally create associations on the spot.

Suppose you don’t pause and associate but just read on through. What would happen? First, you would omit making several associations because you would not notice how the details of each representation map onto each other, and second, you would miss a chance to firm up any associations you made by repeating on the spot.
Several tips for making easy asssociations:

• When translating between words and images, start by asking questions. For example, you might ask yourself, “How does this verbal idea match a visual idea?” Then answer the question. If you start with a part of the image, ask yourself, “How does this part of the image translate into words?” You can use other questions. “I wonder what that phrase looks like in the image?” “I wonder what words would express this picture?” Similar questions can be developed for analogies and examples. The purpose of asking a question is to make the question something in your mind to associate with and then link an answer to it. Later in a test or in real life, when a similar question occurs you are more likely to be able to recall that information.
• Use your fingers to mark each of the two parts that are separate but related. The purpose is to speed up your ability to look back and forth at each of them; seeing one right after the other makes it easier to build firm associations.
• When reading definitions of concepts and examples of them, pause in your reading to make time to discriminate and generalize the definitions while the ideas are still available in your working memory. To discriminate among concepts means that you think about the differences between related but dif-ferent concepts. To generalize a concept means that you think about a wide range of examples that the concept applies to. If you merely read on, your memory for the definitions will fade and you may lose the ability to make sharp discriminations and generalizations.
• When you are studying a section on how to solve problems, do some problems right away in the same study session, before your memory fades. By promptly doing problems after reading about them, you make associations. Don’t delay overnight or your faded memory will often create the need to restudy the material in order to do problems.

Conclusion
Notice that this study tip on doing your first reading of science text chapter deals mostly with getting understand-ing. It takes advantage of making easy associations. But it omits making associations firm. When you read and study the chapter again in different ways, you will build many more associations, see more relationships among the parts of the chapter, and make associations much firmer.

(Dan Hodges. 7/07)

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