Exercise Four Reading Using books

Notes These exercises are based on those of William Perry a brilliant American educationalist. They are great fun and very illuminating especially for level 3 students. Perry gave first year Harvard students the task of getting the gist of a text in just t enty minutes hich as far too long to read in that time. !inety percent of them simply started reading from the beginning" and continued ord for ord until the time as up. They understood the small proportion they managed to read in the time" but had little idea of the piece as a hole. The other ten percent skimmed it" usually discovering the excellent summary at the end of the text# Perry concluded that the students did not kno ho to read purposefully. $kimming is done to check the relevance of a text for an assignment" or to get the gist of book. $kimming might include% &ust reading the blurb on the dust jacket 'ooking at the contents page reading the first and last paragraphs of each chapter reading the first and last lines of each paragraph looking for summaries" bullet points" lists" diagrams etc There is more detail in (raham (ibb)s book $ome students don)t believe you can understand the ideas properly unless the entire text is read. *n everyday studying there is very little incentive and a good deal of risk

involved in trying out a completely ne ay of going about a reading task. *n exercises such as these it is relatively safe" and so it can be very re arding + and even exciting + to students to be asked to do something completely ne . *n this case students are asked to extract the guts from a book first in t o minutes" and subse,uently in another ten minutes. What materials to use. -hoose as material any structured book + suggested further reading" for example" hich is far too long to .read. but has some reasonably coherent message /i.e0 not a book of readings" or a science text book1. Alternatively you could use the short article attached. This is very amusing" appropriate to the topic" but not a very easy read. There is an excellent summary of it to ards the end in the form of a numbered list. 2e students ill discover this" and that of course" is a learning point. There is more detail in (raham (ibb)s 3ook.

Instructions
Working alone (2 min) 4*magine you are about to attend a tutorial on this text. 5ou only have t o minutes to check out hat it is about before the tutorial starts. 6ff you go# . (2min.) .6k" no rite do n hat you think the book is about + as much as you have gathered in your t o minutes. 7on.t 8cheat9 by looking back at the text. Working in airs (!"#$ min.) /Take : minutes for a short article and ;< minutes if you have an entire book.1 -ompare hat you have ritten do n" and compare how you found it. 7o you think you)ve got to the heart of it= 7on)t 8cheat9 (2min.) *)m going to give you another five>ten minutes" no " to make hat you can of this text" but 3efore you start" just suggest a fe 8plans of action9 to each other. Ho are you going to tackle it= Working alone (!"#$ min.) 46?" you are going to have to explain hat you think the text is about to a different person after you)ve had five>ten minutes to ork on it. 6ff you go.) Working in airs (#$ min.) 42orm pairs ith someone different. Taking it in turns" one of you explain to the other hat you no believe the text to be about. Ho did you gain that understanding= 7o you both look at the same parts of the book=)

4$hare your understanding of the book. What ere the best ays /and the orst ays1 of gaining that understanding= 7id your initial one@ minute scans affect the ay you used the book= Alect a chairman ho notes do n good ideas about understanding the book the book ,uickly.) Working in %ours (#! min.) 4Aach group in turn" explains one good ay of getting to grips ith the book in a short time. 7id other groups use those methods=) Working in lenar& (#$ min.) -ontinue till items are exhausted.

Working in airs (#$ min.)

'aterials
/for an exercise on the reading of short articles1 ()tudents* use and misuse o% reading skills* by William Perry* Br President" t enty years ago this 2aculty undertook an experiment to see if some of its students could be taught to read better. $ince the 2aculty as then something of a pioneer in such an enterprise" it ould seem appropriate that it should receive" after t o decades" at least a report of progress + the more so because the ork no concerns not the correction of disabilities of a fe students but the direction of the abilities of a large proportion of the freshman class. The students of this college are reputed to spend a good deal of time reading. *n fact" a student sits ith his books for nearly a thousand hours each year. The 2aculty has a deep concern that these hours be fruitful. This concern is evident in the ording of assignments" in the layout of instruction in each course" and in the conversations of teachers ith their students. *t as this same concern that started the original experiment in reading improvement in ;C3D. The experiment began ith a rather mechanical emphasis. *t consisted of an instructor" hose main job as to run a projector for the first Harvard Eeading 2ilms" and some thirty student volunteers" hopefully the orst readers in the freshman class /and at that time there apparently ere some freshmen ho for Harvard)s intents and purposes found it hard to read at all1. The class met for about ;D to F< sessions and engendered enough
*

enthusiasm to become" like many and experiment" a kind of annual fixture" this one kno n as the Eemedial Eeading -ourse. Aach year freshmen as they arrived in the fall ould take a reading test and those ho scored lo est ould be informed of their plight and allo ed to volunteer for the continued experiment. When the 3ureau of $tudy counsel took over the actual instruction in this course in ;CGH" e met ith thirty depressed +looking volunteers one evening in a basement class@room some here. !ot kno ing really hat e ere up against" e gave them still another reading test of a standard sort and discovered that every single one of them could score better on this test than D:I of the college freshmen in the country. We felt that to be useful to these people in their genuine dissatisfaction e ere going to have to take a ne look at the reading improvement game. We therefore abandoned the ord 4Eemedial) for the course and upgraded the material until it could jar the teeth of the average graduate student. Then e thre the doors open. The amount of enthusiasm that exists in this community to read better + or if not better" then at least faster + is evidenced by the fact that e son found ourselves ith nearly D<< people enrolled in the course. When e examined the roll" e found that e had some G<< freshmen from Harvard and Eadcliffe" ;<< upperclassmen" F3< graduate students from the various schools" especially that of 3usiness Administration and t o professors + from the 'a $chool. Although the fees paid by these multitudes looked very attractive on the budget of a small office" e came to feel this as stretching our energies

Perry" W. 4$tudents) use and misuse of reading skills)" Harvard Educational Review, vol. FC" ;C:C. -opyright ;C:C by President and 2ello s of Harvard -ollege.

too far. We have subse,uently cut the class in half and have been trying to make some sensible systems of priorities hereby e might offer first chance on seats to roughly that third of the freshman class that might be most likely to benefit from this kind of instruction. *n trying to find our ho these people might be" a e have turned up some observations about freshmen hich may be of interest to the 2aculty. 6ne onders first of all hy students ho read" on tests" as ell as these do" should ant to attend a reading course at all" much less one that meets daily at D o)clock in the morning. 6f course a number come in hope of magic + some machine they)ve heard of that ill stretch their eyes until they can see a hole page at a glance. This is understandable. 2reshmen are deprived rather abruptly of the luxury of thinking that reading is something they can finish" and are confronted instead ith an infinite orld of books in hich they sense that they may forever feel behind" or even illiterate. 3ut year by year it has become more apparent that hat the students lack is not mechanical skills but flexibility and purpose in the use of them + the capacity to adjust themselves to a variety of reading materials and purposes that exist on a college level. What they seen to do ith almost any kind of reading is to open the book and read from ord to ord" having in advance abandoned all responsibility in regard to the purpose of the reading to those ho had made the assignment. They complain conse,uently of difficulty in concentrating and feel that they have 4read) hole assignments but are unable to remember anything in them. We have therefore shifted the emphasis of the reading course a ay

from mechanics over to an effort to shake students loose from this conscientious but meaningless approach to their ork. We have that if they can be persuaded of their right to think" even though reading" they can then develop a broader and more flexible attack on the different forms of study and put their skills to meaningful use on long assignments. *n offering freshman priority on seats in the course" therefore" e have naturally anted to kno about their flexibility and their sense of purpose in reading. This is a hard thing to measure. To make some estimate of it e designed a reading test + as reading test go it may be rather peculiar + and presented it to the freshmen of Harvard and Eadcliffe hen they arrived this $eptember. We suspected the students might learn more from it than e ould" but this seemed a legitimate chance to take. * should like to describe this test and tell you hat the students did ith it. 2irst of all" instead of the usual short passages hich appear on reading tests" e presented students ith thirty pages of detailed material + a complete chapter from a history book. We asked them to imagine they ere enrolled in a course entitled The (ro th of Western *nstitutions. We asked them to picture themselves sitting do n of an evening to study one assignment in this course + this chapter entitled 8The 7evelopment of the Anglish $tate" ;<HH@;FJF9. They ere to suppose that they had t o hours ahead of them for this ork" but that after all" they still had their 2rench to do and some -hemistry to revie before they ent to bed. At the same time" they ere to imagine that in this course an hour@ examination ould be give in about a eek on hich they ould be asked to rite a short essay and to 4identify)

important details. We told them to go ahead about their reading in hatever ay they thought best and to take notes of they ished. We told them this as a test of hat they derived from the early stages of their study of regular assignments and that in about F< minutes or so e ould stop them and ask them ,uestions appropriate to their particular method of ork. We then turned them loose. T enty@t o minutes later e stopped them and asked them hat they had been doing. *f they reported that they had been reading from the very beginning and going straight ahead into the chapter + hether rapidly in the first reading" or carefully ith a more rapid revie in mind + e gave them regular multiple@choice ,uestions on the chapter as far as they had gone in it. Kp to this point the test as fairly standard" and e can report that the cast majority of the students" over ninety per cent of them in fact" reported that this as exactly hat they had done. We can report that their rate of ork in this particular approach as astonishing and their capacity to ans er multiple@choice ,uestions on detail as impressive. $ome of them had read as many as t enty pages of very detailed material and ere able to ans er accurately every sensible ,uestion e could ask them about the detail. The freshman class + as far as e could see + of both Harvard and Eadcliffe" consisted of a most remarkable collection of readers + in the narro sense of the term. The sho ing is most remarkable because" of course" these ninety per cent of the class ere going at this chapter in the hardest ay imaginable. 'et me explain hat * mean. The chapter in ,uestion is an admirable

piece of exposition" but like may admirable chapters it makes no initial statement of its aims" and it takes a little hile to get going. And as a conse,uence" the reader begins at the beginning ith the 3attle of Hastings and reads ord by ord is likely to find himself at page three hopelessly bogged do n in the shires" the hundreds and the marches of Anglo@ $axon Angland. And after ten minutes or so" this as just here the students reported themselves to be. What ere interested it determine as ho many students in the face of this burden of detail" the purpose of hich as not clear" ould have the moral courage + or should e call it the immoral courage + to pull themselves out and look at the ending of the chapter. 6r even to survey the entire marginal gloss set out like sign posts page by page. The very ending has a bold flag out beside it hich says + 4Eecapitultion). As a summary paragraph e doubt that e have ever seen a better one. 2rom a half minute study of this paragraph the hole development of the chapter becomes immediately clear to a reader and puts him in a strong position" not only to select among details as he reads them" but also to remember" for their meaningfulness" the details he ould need to support and intelligent discourse. 6ut of these ;:<< of the finest freshmen readers in the country only ;:< even made a claim to have taken a look ahead during t enty minutes of struggle ith the chapter. And the vast majority of these seemed to have looked ahead only to determine ho long the assignment as. We asked anyone ho could do so to rite a short statement about hat the chapter as about. The number ho ere able to tell us in terms that had

something to do ith the gro th of institutions" as just one in a hundred +fifteen. As a demonstration of obedient purposelessness in the reading of CCI of freshmen e found this impressive. We had been looking for one@third of the class most in need of our beneficent instruction and e had found just about everybody. We tried to find out if the students gad behaved this ay simply because it as a test + they reported no" that they al ays orked this ay. When e pointed the ending out to them" some said 45ou mean you can sometimes tell hat a chapter is about by looking at the end) and others said" 46 'ord" ho many times have * been told#). Told or nor" after t elve years of reading home ork assignments in school they had all settled into the habit of leaving the point of it all to someone else. We kne from our o n efforts to teach independence of approach in reading that students find it hard to hear us even hen e ask the sheer bulk of college ork could be handled in no other ay. And e supposed that school@teachers had an even harder time of it. We ere therefore prepared to find this idespread passivity of purpose0 e ished to go beyond this and to identify those students hose misconceptions of reading involved something orse" so at variance ith the goals of Harvard that they might be especially slo at learning from their college experience. We had therefore added another turn to our test. We asked students to imagine further that in their imaginary course an examination had been given on hich an essay ,uestion had appeared. This ,uestion / hich e hoped as a proper@type Harvard essay ,uestion1

reads% 42rom ;<HH@;FJF" the !orman and Angevin ?ings laid the foundations of Anglish self government both by their strengths and by their eaknesses). 7iscuss. /T enty minutes1. We then presented them ith t o ans ers" purporting to have been ritten by t o students. The first of these as a chronological reiteration of the chapter by a student ith an extraordinary memory for dates and kings and no concern for the ,uestion /or for any intellectual issue at all" for that matter1. We calculated that no instructor ith a shred of compassion in him could give this ans er less than a -@even though it might deserve less. The second essay ans er" shorter" and ith hardly a date in it" addressed itself stringently to the issues posed by the ,uestion. We supposed this ans er to be orth a 3L" or perhaps an A@to a relieved instructor. *n validating the test" e had then begged the assistance of the chief section man in a real course" not holly unlike this imaginary course of ours" and asked him to grade essays. 6f the first" he said that he really couldn)t give the student a 7 because he had orked so hard0 of the second e ere pleased to hear him say that this as obviously an A student" even though all he as going to get out of this essay as a 3L. To the freshmen" then" e presented on the test these t o ans ers ithout reporting their value and asked them to state hich of the essays as the better" hich the orse" and to give their reasons. We are happy to say that on this they did ,uite ell. 6nly t o hundred students graded the better essay the orse" and only t o hundred more gave the rong reasons for the correct grading. This means that" on this particular measure" only a rough

third of our freshmen sho ed themselves to be headed to ard the rong goals. Mery possibly" ere this same test to be given a year later in the year" the percentage ould be much less. 3ut e have experience to support that the tendency persists + often tragically. These then ere students to hom e turned our attention. Kntil such students revise their sense of purpose of reading in increase effort is likely to produce only orse results. 6ddly" e have as yet found nothing else to distinguish them form other people. The number of them ho come form public schools as against private schools is exactly the same as for the class as a hole" and they are by no means the least intelligent members of their class. We are eager to find if e can learn more about ho they get their misconceptions. We hope that the Eeading -ourse may help to turn some of them around. Perhaps the test itself helped0 the section man ho helped us ith the test as ,uick to point its instructional possibilities" and e gave the text and essays to the students to take ith them" together ith them" together ith a page of comments. *t as encouraging to have to thread one)s ay after ards through knots of students orking over their papers. What might the faculty conclude from all this. As the faculty)s agent in this area" * can report my o n conclusions from this t enty year experiment. 1 *t appears that most students can learn to read better. 2 The instruction that assists them to do so does not centre in the mechanics of reading. The mechanics of reading skill are inseparable at this level from the

individual)s purpose as he reads. *f you train someone in mechanics alone" he drops right back into his old habits the minute he picks up an assigned test. 3 The possession of excellent reading skills as evidenced on conventional reading tests is no guarantee that a student kno s ho to read long assignments meaningfully. The fact that the Admissions -ommittee is providing students to higher and higher ability should not lull the 2aculty into feeling that at last it does not have to teach students ho to study. *n fact the responsibility is only the greater" for these students have the ability to muddle through assignments the rong ay and still get that retched -@. G. There can no be general rules for teaching the exercise of judgement in reading. $uch judgement re,uires courage" and cannot be taught by rule" it can dared" or redirected" in ay appropriate to particular subjects and learning tasks. To be sure" the reading of conflicting authorities is a fertile ground for young courage and an excellent exercise in reading skill. And a -@ for the attainment of useless kno ledge is perhaps less of a kindness in the long run than congratulations for effort and a clean A for expending it in the rong game. Ho ever" the individual instructor in his o n course remains the best judge of ho to set up his assignments so that they demand a redirection of effort to ards effort and a ay from ritual. :. A short separate course of general instruction" like the reading class can be of some contributing value" if only because it offers a moment)s freedom to experiment ithout the treat of failure. 3ut limits are very clear. *n

such a course e can only dramatise the issues" and this only in the area of very general expository reading. We can refer only briefly to science and must leave literature explicitly alone. We feel" too that only a narro line of sprit divides such instruction from an invitation to mere gamesmanship. We sometimes orry in teaching method ithout content" lest students gather that e recommend a glance at the ending of chapters and at nothing else. /We do dare students to suppose that even this is sometimes appropriate.1 * should like to be able to report" in conclusion" that hen e do succeed in introducing students to the rigots of thoughtful reading they are invariably grateful. * must confess" a bit ruefully" that this is not al ays the case. * have here a description of this kind of instruction in a student)s ords. To assist us in developing the course e have occasionally given the students a ,uestionnaire at the end" and this one of a year or so ago as a real up@to@ date $ocial@$cience@type" ,uestionnaire% open ended at the beginning" pointed at the end" and all. *t says here" 4 hat do you think about it no = 3ig space. 6n the other side a lot of specific ,uestions. We did not ask students to sign their names" only to enter the scores they made at the beginning and end of the course. This student)s scores hen he came to the course sho ed him to have derived only a 7@ kind of understanding from considerable study of the material. At the end he as obtaining a straight A understanding in one@third of the time. * remember settling back ith this one in anticipation of those comments that a teacher so loves to hear + but not at all. He as furious. 4What did you expect hen you came to this course=) * expected an organised effort to

improve my reading.) What do you think about it no = This has been the sloppiest and most disorganised course * have taken. 6f course" * have made some progress" but this as due entirely to my o n effortsNN)