What is it?
Self-study of reading material is a learning technique which involves students to study on their own with minimal supervision. Reading is an essential part of learning and it is important that students are actively engaged with reading material to optimise their learning. Active reading does not just include highlighting, underlining, re-reading texts or note taking. It also involves organising, summarising and evaluating texts.
Why use it?
- Helps students study at their own pace.
- As part of a flipped learning approach, it helps to promote active engagement in classroom activities as they have completed their pre-reading prior to the class.
- Enables the instructor to assess their students’ knowledge and understanding of the topic and incorporate relevant activities to facilitate their learning.
How do I do it?
- Provide the students with the pre-reading to be completed prior to the classroom session. This is particularly important if a flipped approach is adopted.
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To actively engage the students, ask the students to critically analyse the reading material using the following question:
- What is the purpose of the reading material?
- How does my prior knowledge relate to the current material?
- What is confusing about the material?
- Is it possible to relate the concepts in the material? If so, how can they be related?
- What conclusion can I draw from the material?
- Finally, based on the questions outlined above, ask students to summarise the material by either writing up a one-minute paper or create a concept-map to visualise their findings, perspectives or reflections..
Considerations
- Depending upon the student cohort you may prefer to provide a set of questions that the students will need to answer prior to the class to ensure their readiness for the next session. This can be a formative assessment based on the reading material.
- If the material is lengthy you may choose to break it down into sub-sections and ‘chunk’ the material into manageable sections. These may be broken down by themes or concepts.
Resources
This resource includes strategies on active reading and how these can be turned into teaching sessions – https://emedia.rmit.edu.au/learninglab/content/reading-skills
A quick, easy to read guide on effective reading for your students – https://student.unsw.edu.au/effective-reading
A quick guide to the strategy of Preview, Read and Recall – https://ugs.utexas.edu/slc/study/prr
A quick review of reading strategies – https://www.uow.edu.au/student/learning-co-op/effective-studying/effective-reading/
