16 Feb 2006 - 03:13

an approach to reading that really works

Catherine pointed me (pointed us all) to a book, a while ago, called How To Double Your Child's Grades In School, by Eugene Schwartz. I bought it, because I always do what Catherine tells me to do, especially if it's inexpensive (this book costs only $10.00 new).

I'd love to double my child's grades in school (although I'm not clear on how you would double a B or a C). I'd just as much love to double my own -- that is, I'd like to learn anything I can that will help me be a better reader and learner. Learning is hard for me; I'm curious about a million things, and I can't take them in as fast as I want to, so things end up going by the wayside. This will be true in spades for Ben, if we can't find ways to help him maximize his time spent reading and learning while he's young.

I've tried other books that purport to tell me how to read better -- and in fact most of them say pretty much what this book says. But there's something about this book. It tells you exactly what to do, step by step; you follow the steps, and they work. Or, that is, you get your child to follow the steps, and they work for your child. The whole book is written in that format -- make your child do this and do that, and watch his grades double.

But of course, the parent needs to learn how to do it first if she's going to teach it to her child. Right?

Here's the reading method Schwartz teaches, in a nutshell.

Pre-read the assignment

First, pre-read the book, and make mental note of:

• the title
• the table of contents
• the index
• the introduction

This will help you understand the main theme of the book as a whole, which in turn will improve your understanding of it.

This seems obvious... but for some reason, when I pick up a book and start reading it, I usually begin at page 1 and start reading -- anything else seems like cheating. Perhaps that's because I began my reading career reading a lot of fiction, like everyone else.

Schwartz is right; you can learn a lot about a book from reading just the title, the preface, and the table of contents.

Next step: pre-read the individual chapter, and look for signposts that indicate what the main ideas are.

There are eight signposts of every chapter:

• the chapter title
• the section headings
• the paragraph headings (if any)
• the introductory paragraphs
• the summary paragraphs
• the first sentence of each paragraph
• the figures (if any)
• any marginal titles (if any -- not likely)

If you write these out, you will have an outline of the main ideas of each chapter.

A side comment -- I often find illustrations and figures in textbooks annoying and distracting. This is more true for lower-grade texts than for upper-grade texts and adult nonfiction. So I would give permission to ignore illustrations on the first pass through at least, for what it's worth.

The next trick sounds kind of stupid -- but it's the coolest thing.

turn the chapter's main ideas into questions

Any idea, phrase or sentence can be turned into a question by putting what, when, where, why, or how in front of it.

Take your reading assignment outline, extracted from your chapter signposts, and turn them into questions. The chapter title the background sources of Greek Civilization becomes what are the background sources of Greek Civilization?. A chapter title of The human body: a living machine becomes how is the human body like a living machine?.

Now you read each chapter, looking only for the answers to your questions.

You can see immediately what this technique does. It forces your attention on the main points, and prevents your being distracted by minor details.

But his method doesn't stop there. It goes on to tell you how to teach your child (yourself) how to power through the text fast, and retain it. I'll post more on that tomorrow.


my own applied research on this reading method

Years ago, I taught post-calculus probability and statistics, and really loved it. In grad school it seemed too grubby for me; but now it seems cool to me, to use math to quantify the unknowable.

I've been meaning to buckle down for quite a while, and brush up on prob and stat; particularly the statistics side, which I had to race through too quickly when I taught it.

A while ago, someone pointed me to the MIT Open Courseware website. The contents of this site are spotty -- not every professor sees fit to upload his course notes and materials - but there is really a lot of good stuff there. I found a math department course on Statistics for applications. The professor uploaded his notes, which are sketchy -- but they provide a good outline, and even fill in some details here and there.

I want to 'take' that course, and really benefit from and absorb the material as though I were there (yes! at MIT! But without the pressure and definitely without the tuition!).

But simply charging in and starting to read will cause me to get bogged down. I know this; I've been teaching myself things for years, but not as effectively as I could have been. I tried teaching myself Kalman filtering last year, got bogged down in minutiae and confusion, and let myself be distracted by something else that was more important. Same thing with my attempts to teach myself Bayesian decision theory and Bayesian inference and a whole host of other things. I work hard, but in the end it doesn't add up; in the long run I don't benefit from my own work as much as I could.

So I thought I'd try this reading technique -- since if it works, I want to start teaching it to Ben.

It seems lame on the surface to simply go through each chapter, reading the paragraph and section headings, and converting them into questions. But there is something about it; it converts the reading into a much more active, aggressive process.

As it is, we tend to skip over section headings, especially if they are as fascinating as 'the hypergeometric distribution'. But when you convert that heading to 'what is the hypergeometric distribution?', it becomes something else. It becomes a question that you must answer before you move on, one of the questions you must know the answer to if you are going to be able to say you've learned that section.

It gives you permission, too, to skip the things in that section that don't relate to the question -- the history of the distribution's derivation by some statistician, or how it derives from some other distribution through some funny trick. If it doesn't answer the question at hand, you can skip it.

I'm not just using the MIT open courseware notes as a source for answering all my questions -- for one thing, it doesn't have all the answers; they're just notes. I have a whole pile of ten statistics books (cheap, used books) that I can go through to look for the answers to the questions the MIT notes raise. I'm mainly getting the benefit of knowing what Dr. Dmitry Panchenko of the MIT math department thinks constitutes a course in applied statistics; a list of the questions I need to know the answers to, in order to say I've learned the material he covers.

More to come.

-- CarolynJohnston - 16 Feb 2006

Back to main page.

---

---

Comments

After entering a comment, users can login anonymously as KtmGuest (password: guest) when prompted.
Please consider registering as a regular user.
Look here for syntax help.

---

I am SO jealous!!

I'm desperate to learn Bayesian statistics AND post-calculus statistics & probability - - - and first I'm going to have to get to calculus!

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Feb 2006

---

This book was fascinating to me, because I seem to have developed very good 'reading skills'.....and I can teach myself new content quickly. (I have to be able to do that to be a nonfiction writer covering lots of different fields.)

I remember that I used to think it was 'illegal' to 'skip ahead.'

I still do, when it comes to fiction.

But at some point I developed the exact sequence of behaviors he describes early on: I almost obsessively pour over the TOC, foreword, & index.

I'm not kidding.

I'm CONSTANTLY going over these things.

I've often wondered why I do this, whether it's some quirky, obsessive thing — am I impatient to be finished with the book, so I'm looking to see how much is left?

Reading Schwartz, I realized that my cognitive unconscious had learned these ideas over the years of trying to acquire info rapidly.

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Feb 2006

---

I found the ask-a-question idea profound.

Walter Pauk has a wonderful passage on asking questions that I'll get posted....

This part was new to me.

Since I'm obsessive, I do think I need to read 'thoroughly.'

Intelligent, analytic, forceful skimming is a skill I didn't develop on my own.

I'm going to spend lots of time practicing efficient reading — and I'm going to use the subheadings much more actively than I've done in the past.

-- CatherineJohnson - 20 Feb 2006

---

I found the ask-a-question idea profound.

It is. There's something about it. It makes the process of reading active, rather than a sit-back-and-take-it-in sort of passive.

'Forceful skimming' doesn't come naturally to me at all. I've learned most of my math by doing problems, and going back into the text to find examples and answers to questions as they came up in the problem set. This is not a bad approach, except that not every math book has problem sets; and sometimes the problem sets are either not good enough or not extensive enough to enable you to learn everything you could from the text.

So forceful-skimming-through-question-asking is going to come in very handy for me. And I will teach it to Ben.

-- CarolynJohnston - 21 Feb 2006

---

I'm going to TEACH THIS TO MASTERY.

I haven't gotten to it yet, but I sure will. (I may put it on hold 'til summer. I do need to spend some time practicing the mechanics - the turning headings-into-questions, writing on one side of the paper, etc.)

-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Feb 2006

---

This is probably the very best book on college study: How to Study in College by Walter Pauk

I've only dipped into it, but his approach sounds very much like Schwartz's; in fact, I think of Schwartz as Walter Pauk for kids.

Pauk has a terrific section on asking questions.

Pauk invented the Cornell note-taking system.

-- CatherineJohnson - 22 Feb 2006