It’s challenging for slow readers.

Related Post: Getting the Most out of a Scholarly Publication

Doctoral programs are all about reading and becoming acquainted with the literature in the field. When I was teaching a doctoral course about mixed methods research, I’d regularly assign a chapter from my textbook, An Introduction to Fully Integrated Mixed Methods Research, and three or four journal articles for each session. That’s probably about 100 plus pages of reading a week. When I was an undergraduate, I majored in English literature. There, the assignment was usually a novel a week!

Most people are not fast readers. The slower the reader, the more likely it is to doze off while reading. Reading can be arduous for the slow reader who is usually also a word-by-word reader. 

Fast or slow, doctoral students need a set of strategies to manage readings assignments and enhance reading comprehension. I suggest four steps to get started:

• set your intent, 
• get an overview, 
• use tools to interact with text, and
• fix it in your mind by rehearsing the key points. 

Step 1: Set Your Intent

The first step when approaching a reading assignment is to consider what type of attention you want to award to it. Is this something you can award 15 minutes to or the full 90 minutes to two hours that it would take to read it carefully, front to back, word by word. Surprise. Journal articles are not the same as a math formula. Only a few are so relevant to your own research and interests that it’s necessary to devour each and every word. 

In many cases, the task is to zero in on an author’s key points. Initial ideas generated by an AI summary tool can be followed by searching a PDF article for a keyword that is often introduced in the title. For example, I spent the early hours today re-reading a wonderful chapter about mixed methods research by Nigel Fielding that appeared in Bergman’s (2008) Advances in Mixed Methods Research. The clue to the article’s main point is in the phrase “analytic density” that appears in the title. A word search of the article would, I’d guess, find 30-45 references to the term. A reader could find the main points of this article just by searching the document for uses of the term.

Step 2: Get an Overview

Not all scholarly publications are so well written that it is as easy to single out the key points as the example I just mentioned. In that case, the next step is step back a bit to get an overview of the article or chapter. Start with the title. Read the abstract. Check out the keywords. Think a bit. Thumb through it to glance at the headings. Then check out the introduction and the discussion. 

Step 3: Use Strategies to Interact with the Text

It can be a struggle to stay awake if you don’t find ways to get your mind actively engaged with it as if you are having a conversation. This is the point that you can gain by printing out an article, start using your markers, and find ways to make notations to it of your thoughts and reactions. 

You can advance your comprehension by widening your focus to think more broadly about it relative to what else has been assigned. In my case, I’d often pick publications that expressed different viewpoints about the same topic. You can advance your recall by thinking about the links between articles – the similarities and difference. This is actively engaging the text. 

Step 4: Rehearse the Key Points

Before setting the text aside, take a minute to tick off its main points. This will improve your recall of it.  Jot them down on the front page of the article. That speeds the whole process if you have to return to the article for a test or paper.