Savvy Strategies for Academic Reading

Presented Wednesday October 18, 2017

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Last updated 11/5/2017

 

Visual: Presentation opens with title slide “Savvy Strategies for Academic Reading.”

Visual: Slide changes to “Learning Objectives” and lists 4 main learning objectives.

Audio: Hillary: Thanks, Shawn.  I'm going to start us off today.  As Shawn said my name is Hillary.  I have been with Walden for about seven years. And what I do is teach students in the Academic Skills Center.  I teach writing and APA courses. And I also manage the graduate writing courses that are part of the Academic Skill Center as well.  I live in Southern New Hampshire right now.  And in terms of reading, I consider myself an avid reader.  I love reading.  Some types more than others.  I don't love academic reading but I understand and appreciate it.  I understand its place in my knowledge.  So that's what we're going to be focusing on today is kind of getting an appreciation for academic reading and also effective ways to make it a little bit easier on ourselves.

So the learning objectives today are to reflect on our reading successes and challenges.  Identify strategies to address challenges of comprehension and speed.  Examine approaches to reading a research article specifically.  And access resources for further learning.  So both Dr. Inkpen and I will guide you through all of these topics today.

Visual: Slide changes to “Activity: Kickoff Questions”

Audio: Hillary: Now, I want to hear from you as a way to begin our presentation.  What aspect of reading to you find more enjoyable.  And then what aspect of reading do you find most challenging.  So you can address both of these questions or just one of them.  But reflect on those questions and then type in the chat box what your answer would be. And I will go on mute while you go ahead and type. [Pause]

Audio: Hillary:  So we have some folks saying boredom is a challenge.  Maintaining focus.  Being really interested in what I'm reading.  And Lou Anne says it is enjoyable to learn new information but challenging to follow the flow of some academic writing.  I certainly relate to that.  We want the information but we want to present -- we want it presented in the clearest possible way.  Especially with research articles, it is not always in a logical format or the writer is not always thinking about the reader and how the reader will experience the information so it can be a challenge to us. And the vocabulary can be difficult, as Robin says. Others are mentioning distractions. Okay, this is great, because a lot of those challenges are points that we are going to talk about in this presentation today. [Pause]

All right, I'll just wait for a couple more comments to come in.  [Pause]

Okay.  Some are saying the reading is very slow because of the need to reread and to take notes while reading so that lengthens the time spent on each piece.  Some are saying they enjoy reading scholarly pieces and certain sections of an article because they are presented well and the
editors might make them readable. So, yeah.  That's what we want to strive for here is an enjoyment or at least not a phobia about reading.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Strategies: Comprehension”

Audio: Hillary: Okay, thank you for your contributions there. And we will revisit those challenges later on in the presentation.  So as I continue to go through these slides, be thinking about how you could address the challenges that you have identified. So first, I just want to kind of step back and say that all reading is not created equal, right.  You might enjoy reading novels or reading for pleasure just on the side.  But academic reading is tough.  It's complex.  The materials are not always written in the clearest or most user-friendly manner as many of you have mentioned.  So even if you are an excellent reader of in particular maybe mysteries, you might find academic reading more challenging.  And that's because it is a different experience.  So I just want to acknowledge that right away. We'll start off by discussing some general strategies for improving comprehension and speed.

So comprehension refers to your understanding of what you read. And three main areas feed into that comprehension.  Those areas are, first, your vocabulary proficiency.  Second, your familiarity with the background or concepts on the topic.  Finally, your skill in decoding the content of the reading itself.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Strategies: Comprehension- Vocabulary”

Audio: Hillary: Vocabulary. You can only understand information if you understand the words being used, right.  I suggest that if you are reading an online article, for example, you keep a tab open to Merriam Webster's online dictionary.  Type in a word you don't know for the basic definition.  Read it and then read the sentence, replacing the word with the definition.  On the other hand, if there are words you sort of know but are not completely confident in that understanding you can often figure them out based on the context. 

So examine the phrases before and after the word you don't know.  Also, the next sentence that comes in the article or reading. So from that next sentence and those context clues surrounding the word, do you get a sense of what the word means now that you are looking more closely at that surrounding material. So that's a way, if you are on the fence of do I really know what's being said here, is to read more in the article itself to get a grasp of what that word means.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Strategies: Comprehension- Background and Concepts”

Audio: Hillary: Okay.  Background and concepts.  When we approach a reading, we come to it with some basic knowledge on the subject and we access that and we build on it as we are reading. But occasionally we might end up reading above our level of understanding on a certain subject.  And in these cases we don't have that background to draw from, so it can be more difficult. For example, you might be thrown into a course where maybe you are assigned a reading passage on treatment approaches for schizophrenia when you are not entirely sure you understand schizophrenia as an illness.  So that's a problem, right.  You can't really buy in to understanding the treatment if you don't understand the illness that would be targeted with that treatment.

Or maybe you are reading a complex research article on a business model and that business model involves a foundational leadership theory but you have never heard of that theory. So you do need to do additional kind of research to get up to speed in terms of that theory. And these cases, it's important to do additional reading in order to increase your knowledge base. The extra reading might mean Googling the concept you are unfamiliar with to find information.  Or it might mean skimming an introductory textbook or encyclopedia entry.

This is where I like to put in a plug for Wikipedia.  I know Wikipedia, you know, it is bad to even kind of mention that term because you don't want to rely on it when writing papers or for scholarly evidence if you are trying to convince someone of an argument.  But it can help you understanding a concept or give you a general overview so that you can dig deeper into a more scholarly reading.

The third point here is probably something you don't want to hear because we are trying to discuss strategies to read more efficiently.  But essentially you want to read more on the topic in order to get that background.  As you read more and more you will become more versed in the terminology, history, and concepts of a field which will make the next time you read on the subject that much easier. So what I am saying with the third point is to give yourself time, time to expose yourself to more information from the field and this will improve your reading experience.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Strategies: Comprehension- Content”

Audio: Hillary: Okay.  Now we have our third aspect that affects comprehension, and that is content. I'm sure we have all been in the situation where we read something once through, then we say, wait a minute, what did I just read.  Or we read a page or a paragraph and say "what was that?" because we are focused on something else in our brain or there is some other distraction happening around us.  In these instances we are probably reading passively, taking information in but not really doing anything with it. So the strategies listed here all involve being an active reader rather than a passive reader.  Active reading engages your brain and it forces your brain to answer questions and make connections.  And that facilitates your understanding.

So to be an active reader you want to ask questions as you read and answer the questions in the notes you are taking.  Some mentioned note-taking earlier.  So consider, do your notes answer your questions that you are having as you go through your work.  Summarize each paragraph or section in your own words.  And this not only helps with your understanding but eventually when you are writing about the reading you are doing.  If you are writing about that topic later on an assignment, if you have already summarized each paragraph or section, it will be easier to get started on your writing, too.

There are also a number of techniques and frameworks out there such as SQ3R you might have heard one.  And the one on this slide is KWL, which stands for know, want and learned.   How it works, before you read a piece you identify what you already know about the topic and what you want to know.  Then afterward you review what you learned. This is helpful in tapping into that prior knowledge and making you curious about the reading material.
It can also help, for those who perhaps don't feel a connection to what you are reading, you are not interested in it, maybe using this framework would make you tie the information to something in your own life.  So like using that -- what do you want to know about this topic as a way to connect the topic to your own life, okay. All right.  The final strategy here is to read aloud. This might help especially with sections that you have identified as particularly important.  Reading aloud can help you retain the information because you are both hearing it and seeing it.  I know that this helps me.  Sometimes I will read aloud to myself and it will be easier to recall that information later. Okay. And I know there are some questions in the chat box appearing.  I'm going to pause later on at the end of this little segment and then I will address those, okay?

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Strategies: Speed”

Audio: Hillary: Okay.  For speed, we all want to read faster.  Right?  This becomes especially important as you start to write lengthier papers such as literature review or maybe you are working on your master's or doctoral capstone where you read a lot of articles and are drawing on a lot of sources. The first tip is to minimize distractions as best you can.  I know we can't eliminate all of these.  We can't eliminate our children from our lives while reading and maybe we do have to take calls, but think in your own life how can you set aside a little bit of time so your reading experience is a little bit better. Visualize your current setup for reading.  What is that environment like.  Are you constantly switching over to Facebook while you try to read?  Do you have a quiet room?  How can you make it more easier for you to get into that reading mindset. Second, always read with a purpose.  Know why you are reading the particular source.  Is it because you need evidence to support an argument?  Is it because you are interested in the methodology researchers used?  Or is it because you want to know how the theory was applied.  What about the reading is going to be helpful for you. Reading with a purpose allows you to read faster because you can narrow your focus and tune out all the extraneous information that might be getting in the way of what you really want out of the reading.  So you could skim over areas that are not all that effective for you and then do an in-depth read in the areas that will be helpful for you.

Try to read in complete phrases than word-by-word and avoid pronouncing each word.  Technically this will allow you to read faster because your eyes work faster, okay. You can also try a speed reading tool such as Spreed.  I am interested if anyone has tried this or another technology tool for speed reading.  You can go ahead and comment on your experience in the chat box.  But how Spreed works, it isolates chunks of the text and plays them at a certain speed that you can manipulate.  So the words come at you in the isolated format so that you can digest them a little bit faster. Okay. 

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Research Articles” and includes knowing the functions of the sections, the purpose, and performing the “dip your toe” approach.

Audio: Hillary: The next part of the presentation is on reading research articles specifically. The first two points on this slide go hand-in-hand.  You need to know your purpose for the reading.  What are you looking for.  Knowing that purpose will allow you to narrow down and focus your reading. So you might be able to skim certain areas and read others more in-depth. In order to predict which sections will give you the information you need, you of course need to know what each section contains.  And the good news here is that all research articles have a similar format.  So you know what to look for in each section.  You can click on the link on this slide to see an article on what each function of a research article is.  So what is the function of the introduction, the abstract, the discussion section, the conclusions, that kind of thing.

So I'm going to discuss a method for reading a research article I call the dip your toe approach.  Later on, Dr. Inkpen is going to discuss another method.  My method I believe is helpful if you are unsure an article is going to be useful to you and you don't know if you should really read the whole thing.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Research Article: Dip Your Toe” and includes a flow chart of the approach.

Audio: Hillary:  Okay, so here is the dip your toe approach. The reasoning behind this method is to get a sense of what the article is about before you really are fully committing to reading it.  So at first you will look at the title.  What do you think the article is about, based on the title. Then you can go ahead and read the abstract which should provide a brief summary, maybe one paragraph of the research study.  The key words beneath the abstract give an idea of the important concepts in the article.

So based on the surface level information, do you want to learn more.  Is it going to serve your purposes.  If so, you can move on to the actual contents of the article.  First reading the opening of the discussion section.

This opening usually includes a succinct statement about the results and how the researchers are interpreting the results.  Then you can read the full results sections.  Again, these are areas that give you an understanding of the outcome of the study.  What actually was found from that study.  If that outcome meets your purposes, you can -- meets your purposes you can go ahead and dive into the article.  So go ahead and read the introduction. 

Now that you understand the results of the study you can have more appreciation for background going into it. As you are reading pay attention to the headings and first sentences.  The first sentences of each section or paragraph are usually the topic sentences that establish the main idea. So it's important to look at those, because they can give you a good idea of what the topics are as you go along.  They can be kind of signposts to you.  Or you focus in on the first sentence but maybe skim the rest of the paragraph if it is not something you need to read deeply. Okay.  So this is just one approach to reading research articles.

Visual: Slide changes to QA slide.

Audio: Shawn: I'm just scanning through here.  I'm not sure if this was addressed directly, but somebody asked what are study context clues.  I apologize if you mentioned it in the presentation but I wanted to point out that came through.

Audio: Hillary:  Sure, context clues are surrounding material.  You have a vocabulary word or terminology from a research article.  You would read the rest of the sentence and the previous sentence, and the next sentence, to get a feel for what does that word mean based on the -- what the rest of the sentence is saying. So you can maybe fill the gap in your understanding by reading the surrounding material.  That is just what that means. And that would be useful for something where you kind of know what a word means but you're not entirely sure. So instead of looking it up, you could kind of try to figure out based on what the rest of the sentence is saying.

Audio: Shawn: Someone else asked what you mean by limiting the pronouncing in your head.  Performing the dip your toe approach.

Audio: Hillary:  Okay.  Yeah.  So limit pronouncing in your head, that was just a way to increase the speed of your reading.  So if you are focused on:  I want to read faster, rather than "I have trouble with comprehension" this would be an approach for reading faster.  Would be limiting trying to pronounce in your head or even verbalize by reading the work aloud, okay. I presented reading aloud as a way to help with your comprehension.  So if there is something you don't understand, you would read aloud.  But if you want to read faster and you really understand what you are reading anyway, you would avoid that approach.  So some approaches kind of clash with each other.  So it is really important to know what your challenges are and what approaches are best to cover those challenges. [Pause]

Audio: Shawn: One last question.  Someone asks how effective is using find in zooming on the topic important to you.  Find, I imagine CTRL F.

Audio: Hillary:  Oh, interesting.  I had not thought of that.  I'm sure you can use that.   So if you have an article in front of you, doing command F or CTRL F to find a particular word, maybe it is a key word that you are looking for in your research, go ahead and find instances of that in the text.  You can do that.  The only problem with that is that maybe you are not getting the full context in which that word is being used.  You are just getting a small nugget of it.  So you might need to do a little more reading as well.

I do see one more question here.  If you use a supplemental resource to help understand a scholarly resource like Wikipedia do you just cite the resource or both resources.  You would cite the one you are actually using in your writing. So in that case if you use Wikipedia for background on a theory or something, you would not cite that in your writing.  You would just cite the scholarly source that discusses the theory. I hope that made sense. Okay, I think we can move on.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Research Articles: Three Links”

Audio: Hillary: And if we have failed to address your question, you can just type it again and there will be more times for questions at the end.  So I'm sorry if I have missed you.  Okay, so Dr. Inkpen, I'll hand it over to you for another approach to reading research articles.

Audio: Sarah:  Thank you, Hillary.  I'm making a big guess people are probably not reading statistics on a pleasurable base.  But it is so required on research that without reading it with a critical eye, the research, or skipping it, which has been shown that many times when people read an article with graphs or charts or statistics in it that they actually skip that part. And, well, that could be very detrimental to what you get out of the article.  And also for your own ability to write good research questions and match the method and evidence well and the conclusion. So I see it as once you are into academia, especially at the doctoral level, that your ability to read and understand research is part of your job. And so professional development or just being able to understand research is going on all the time and things are always changing.  For you not to be able to understand -- whether you understand the basic statistics that have come up with the conclusion, it is whether you can match what I call the three circles. 

I see them linked as they are here.  The research question with the method and evidence.  The conclusion. And if you can't do that, either it is a bad article or you have missed something.  So again, if you want to put a question in, that's fine.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Research Articles: Research Question”

Audio: Sarah: So the first part is the research question. And I know that always takes a very long time for us to do ourselves.  But it's very clearly written in all the articles you will be reading.  And you need to understand whether it's qualitative or quantitative. Both methods are going to require well-thought-out research question.  Understanding the context and the purpose and what did the researcher hope to find. This will also help you if you are going to cite it.  If they are looking for something that you are interested in or will be part of your academic paper.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Research Articles: Research Question”

Audio: Sarah: Just a couple of examples.  Qualitative papers.  How do teachers understand research when they read research articles.  We're not thinking of gathering numbers or representing this in a way we want to get experiences from teachers.  Maybe by interviews.  Maybe by questionnaires.  Open-ended questionnaires.   Whereas the quantitative research, what is the relationship amongst gender education, on social workers' salaries in Ontario.  We look for predictors.  This would be statistical analysis.  So what we want to know is do -- does gender or education, age, predict salaries.  Each one of these, even though gender is not a number, each one of these can be quantified and -- quantified and then give the strength or how important each one of these are to salaries. I think that makes sense, that we would understand what they were looking at to begin with. So whether you understand all the analysis done isn't as important as you understanding the research question.  And basically does the conclusion work on that.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Research Articles: Methods and Evidence”- description of sample, analyses used, and statistical results.

Audio: Sarah: So once that section is done, there will be another section.  Like Hillary was saying, each of the articles have subtopics.  When you write a research paper, like we did science experiments when in grade school, basically the same thing.  Once we have written the research paper, we're now interested in method and evidence. So description of the sample. I would say by now you need to be having a really critical eye, because does the sample that is chosen really match with the research question you are looking for. Description of the analysis used.  The statistical results from data.  Does it link to the research question. And, you know, is the sample a good representation. I would say in real estate we say the most important thing is location, location, location.  I would say in quantitative research the post important thing is sample, sample, sample.  If the sample is biased in any way, no matter how good the research may be or the analysis may be on what you have picked up, if the sample falls apart, then the rest of the research will not hold any water.  It is like having feet of clay I would say. So -- and I can give examples of sample -- you know, you want to find something about a college and you interview students in one class.  So that will not be representative of the whole campus.  It will only be maybe one major.  Usually we try to have the sample represent the whole by stratifying.  So when you read the article, that should be what you are checking with. Is the sample large enough.  If I am going to talk about something that represents, you know, the United States, I want to have a sample bigger than 50 so I'm sure that I have covered as many areas as possible. My goodness, did I click one by.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Research Articles: Conclusion”

Audio: Sarah: The conclusions here must really be linked to the research question. So, if the research question is addressing -- let's say they want to interview students to see how they feel about the way the courses are delivered.  So they have one class that is delivered by online and they have another class doing face-to-face.  And in the conclusion we better be sure that our conclusion is only talking about the method of delivery.   So for that same example, we would not want to conclude that if the students like face-to-face, those students learned more.  Because the experience or what we were looking for was how they enjoyed the medium.  We didn't ask or we didn't test to see how well they did. Was it coherent.  Was it easy to follow.

So again, when it comes to a conclusion, we can't surprise the reader by concluding the students that had face-to-face environment are better statisticians than those students that were online, when what we were testing for was to see who -- how they enjoyed the medium.  Not how well they did in statistics. So I'm saying that your critical eye must travel along the article and just because it is being published or it's a research article does not mean that it is perfect and that I believe that the more you do on reading and tying these three things together the better you will get at setting up your own research, checking your sample, being sure that your conclusion is based -- and that is not even suggesting you know anything about the analysis, but just making sure, first of all, that it all holds together. I'm not suggesting, either, that you don't know anything about statistics, because I love statistics.

Visual: Slide changes to “Reading Research Articles: Three Links”

Audio: Sarah: So again, I'm coming back to the critical eye. That if you cannot make these connections, if they don't make sense to you, then maybe there is something missing.  So the research question, the hypotheses, you know, we repeat the same thing when we do a research question, is there any relationship between gender, education and salary. And when we finish, we need to be very clear that there is a relationship and here is the model we found from using our statistical analysis. So begin with identifying the three links as a framework for understanding the research. And it also makes reading a lot quicker when you start -- and I don't just mean read the abstract.  I'm saying you need to identify the research question.  Find the method and evidence they have used, and tie the conclusion together.


You know, I can't overemphasize how important that is when you are bombarded with lot of research in the topic you are interested in.  That if you can't make this thread work its way through, then I would move on.  Until either you get good at tying the threads together, or you find articles that are really well put together and it becomes second nature to you.

Visual: Slide changes to QA slides.

Audio: Shawn: It's Shawn.  Somebody asked, for a scholarly article, are the items discussed already given, why would you analyze them while reading?  So it looks where the items are discussed [indiscernible] I don't know what section it was in.

Audio: Sarah:  That's okay.  Well, okay.  There are scholarly article -- they are a scholarly article.  Let's hope everything is good.  But I think you need to have a critical eye so that when you read what the research question is that you can tie those three things together.  So if someone were to say to you what was this article about, if you can answer those three links I would say that you have more than paraphrased or summarized the article.  I guess I'm saying that just to accept that it has been done and is okay, all right, if you don't want to reread the statistical analysis, but it still doesn't stop you from making sure the three links are put together. Does that make sense? Was there more, Shawn?

Audio: Shawn: So checking sources of your sources, I guess is the kind of --

Audio: Sarah:  Absolutely.  And I think it is just good training for you, as well.  I know that we really work hard at being succinct in our research questions when we set them up.  And a good way of doing that is reading ones that have been well written.  And see just how -- there should be no question about the analysis you need once you have written the research question because they're all linked together.

Audio: Shawn: And Denise is asking -- I'm going to paraphrase what she wrote.  The idea if you read an article and there's limited research on a topic, you read an article but you are not necessarily citing it in the paper, but you read that article so it has become part of your knowledge, do you address that citation?  Or is that -- because a lot of us read articles but don't actually address them directly in the citation or research paper.  How do we work with those articles?

Audio: Sarah:  Okay, I think that is really a Hillary answer.  But what I would say is that I only -- would only include articles that I actually cited.  So if it gave me knowledge and I wanted to include that knowledge while I was writing, I would cite it there.

Audio: Shawn: Okay, thank you, Sarah.

Audio: Sarah:  Somebody wrote about the feet of clay.  Somewhere I saw a question --

Audio: Shawn: Little extra explanation about that.

Audio: Sarah:  Okay.  So you want to -- well, my example, if you wanted to get some understanding about -- I teach in the Middle East.  Let's say I wanted to know something about the students that were at the college.  And I only gave the questionnaire or survey or interviews to, let's say, one of my statistics classes.  And I may find out some very rich things, but if I was to discuss students at  postsecondary or community college level, those students are only representative of people having to take statistics, maybe only business students, so I would not have information about IT students or engineers if they don't have to take statistics. So my sample is not representative of the whole.  So even though I may have ended up doing some great statistics on it, it would not be transferable.  I would be doing research on a statistics class at a community college in the Middle East.  So you need to be very careful.

Or that -- well, let's go back to that.  Let's assume there were only women in the statistics class I was doing.  I would not have information on, well, almost half of the students there because it is almost a 50-50 split. I hope that helped. And just another point.  You know, if you are trying to compare two groups.  Or if you want to find out the effects of, you know, immigrants and TB, for instance, you know, be sure that you have both groups represented.  You have the immigrants with TB and the immigrants without TB.  When you are reading you want to look and be sure that the people are represented and represented well.  Even though the statistics looks after a lot of, say, when [indiscernible] are not equal or sample sizes are not equal, we still have to be sure that we have sampled well. Were there more? Just on a personal note, and I know I won't have lot of people thinking the same thing, but for me the whole statistics package just gives -- just makes everything fit.  You know.  When I see it and it is sort of like seeing it in numbers, seeing it in graphs, in words, just as a -- just is comfortable for me.  Maybe it is because I love statistics.  But that hopefully on reading some good research you will see that.  For instance, if you were doing some scatter graph, the more you studied the better the grade.  That's what you would expect.  If you compare one year to the next where you had done an intervention you would hope there would be a positive slope.  So you know, I'm -- I guess reading good research will help you appreciate the contribution of statistics rather than just numbers.

Audio: Shawn: Thank you, Sarah.

Audio: Sarah:  Okay, thank you.

Audio: Shawn: I think that is something that is really important.  When we talk about reading we don't just talk about reading articles.  We talk about reading numbers and statistics as well, so thank you for that perspective of the.

Visual: Slide changes to “Resources for Skill Development”

Audio: Shawn: Are we -- we have a few more resources.  Do you want to -- few more resources here.  Did you want to share these with everyone?

Audio: Hillary:  I can take us through the slide.  I do want to address Robin's question about being unfamiliar with the terminology regarding research questions and statistics and what not. And one place you can go is on this slide, Robin, it is the reading a research article.  That will give you a rundown of what is included in each part of a research article that might help you as you are reading.

Also, there's the Office of Research and Doctoral Services that might have some introductory information on starting to think about what you will be doing in your own research. Maybe, Shawn, you can put the Office of Research and Doctoral Services's link into the chat box for her.  That would be great. Or him, I suppose. Okay. 

So on this slide we do have some Academic Skill Center resources for you
to continue developing your reading skills.  The first five listed here are web pages with information on critical reading which certainly relates to what Dr. Inkpen was talking about with coming to reading with a critical eye and asking questions and being skeptical about what is being put forth. So being a critical reader is like reading actively but it also involves evaluating what you read in terms of the credibility, author's authority, and any potential bias they might have brought into the research or writing process.

Additional info here is on reading a research article.  Reading retention.  Speed reading and vocabulary development for any of you interested in those areas. The final link is to the advanced reading strategies course which is currently a six-week course that really guides you through different reading techniques in order to identify the main idea of a piece.  Determine an argument, evaluate a source, and so on. So that one is beneficial to you if you would like to explore reading strategies in a course format.

Audio: Sarah:  I just got -- one tidbit I use.  I use my snipping tool that comes free in Windows.  When I would read an article, I would snip what I wanted out of it with the references.  Because you can't keep it all.  I found originally I was reading and rereading so many articles.  So this way I would go through, snip what I needed out of it, and I kept a Word document growing and growing with good parts of good articles. So thank you to the snipping tool.

Visual: Slide changes to “Activity: Reflection”

Audio: Hillary:  Great.  Okay.  We do have a final question here for you to think about. So thinking back about what you identified as challenging about reading earlier on in the presentation. Now, based on what we have presented here, what strategies or resources will you apply to address that challenge? So just reflect on, you know, what you learned from this presentation.  How you will apply it to your reading in the future.  You can go ahead and share in the chat area on the right side of the screen. [Pause]

Audio: Hillary:  Okay, we do have some coming in.  So not read every word in the article.  Try Spreed.  Look up words in the dictionary you don't understand.  Using the snipping tool.  Linking all three points together for the research -- for better understanding of the research and how it comes together. Reading aloud so that you are more able to easily comprehend.  That's great. And you have to warn your way first -- yes, definitely, they might think you are talking to yourself! Reading aloud, okay. Yeah, these are great.  Shutting off my phone, mmm-hmm. Yeah, that can really do wonders.  Just have a quiet environment to read in.

Audio: Sarah:  I read an interesting research article that said in our natural state we are chaotic and that when we used to read books it took all our energy to keep ourselves calm and read and we are much happier when interfered with by the phone and social media.  I don't know if I agree with that! [Laughter]

Audio: Hillary:  Now we have practice evaluating what we read, which is definitely important. Okay.  Thank you for sharing what you are going to be working on as you read going forward. Okay, I think that brings us to the end. 

Visual: Slide changes to “Closing slide” and includes information about the Academic Skills Center, including email, and monthly updates with the Savvy Student Newsletter.

Audio: Shawn: Thank you for attending this presentation.  I'll be ending the presentation in about two to three minutes.  Thank you very much.