As I get into the peer review assignment I have been thinking a lot about how I read and engage with the material. Our instructions for the assignment include (emphases are my own):
For this assignment, you will engage in a peer review exercise, by carefully reading and assessing the research design and methodology of an as-yet-unpublished social science research article.Before I began, I picked up a reading from another course titled "How to Read a Book, v4.0" by Paul N. Edwards from the School of Information at the University of Michigan. It has helped me get my bearings as I launch into the peer review. Edwards provides a list of reading strategies and techniques that include:
- read the whole thing
- decide how much time you will spend
- have a purpose and a strategy
- read actively
- read it three times
- focus on parts with high information content
- use PTML (personal text markup language)
- know the author(s) and organizations
- know the intellectual context
- use your unconscious mind
- rehearse and use multiple modes (Edwards, 2000).
If you want to get a better idea of each of the strategies, there is a handy little table on the second page of the article that summarizes each one.
One of the strategies that I find really helpful during my process is to read it three times (at least). First I quickly read the entire document (overview), then I read the article very thoroughly, and finally I re-read it while making notes in the margin that summarize the ideas in my own words. For documents that I will be reading multiple times over and evaluating, I like to have a hardcopy. I know that there are lots of document markup programs for computers, but I know that I work better with a hardcopy.
Does anyone else have any reading strategies or techniques that they find successful?
Edwards, P. (2000). How to Read a Book. Retrieved from http://pne.people.si.umich.edu/PDF/howtoread.pdf
Hi Alyssa, thanks for the list of tips, Just wondering if you (or the author) can you provide an example of how to "use your unconscious mind"?
ReplyDeleteSure! The author notes that a lot of our thinking and mental processing goes on when we aren't explicitly aware of it. So, read a document, leave it alone and go do something else. When you come back to it, ask yourself what you remember. What were some of the key points. What do you still need to learn. Sometimes you will draw new conclusions or understanding of the material based on what your unconcious mind processed outside of the act of reading. So it's not so much trying to use your unconscious mind, but rather not using it…unconsciously (here to mean done or existing without one realizing, or unaware of -- not as in passed out unconscious). Sorry, that last sentence may have been more confusing than clarifying.
DeleteI also interpreted it to refer to those moments when you are doing something completely unrelated to your readings or study and all of a sudden out of nowhere you have an a-ha moment where you understand what a certain author was trying to say or when you draw connections between ideas.
DeleteThanks! That was helpful. Happens to me all the time. Especially across courses. I am taking research methods, bibliographic control and Metadata schemes right now and sometimes it takes doing a complementary class reading to finally "get" it. I can even recognize my active "unconscious mind" happening during my last blog post re: Between ROCM and a hard research question.
ReplyDeleteAlyssa, that list was great. Thanks for sharing. I also really like your explanation of the unconscious mind. There are some articles that I read for class and they stick with me for days. I am in my second year and like Jacqueline, I am also taking bibliographic control and metadata. This semester I am having a lot of a-ha moments as everything sort of comes together.
ReplyDeleteI think my way of reading is very similar to your own. I read things 3 times - once quickly, second time carefully and a third to make notes. I also like having a hard copy to write on (even though it makes me feel like a Luddite). I also find looking up the author on Wikipedia helpful and any reviews on the book (if there are any) just to see what other people had to say.
I agree, thanks Alyssa for posting this list! I am working on my peer review today and find allot of these tips useful.
ReplyDeleteHowever when I read articles I read it in full once and then I'll read it a second time but stopping to make notes. This has been my strategy all through my undergraduate, although I think reading it a third time would only be advantageous.
The unconscious mind is a really interesting idea, as I think everyone has moments where after reading an article, later on something becomes more clear. As well as those moments when your in class and someone explains how they understood the article and you have a "oh thats what it meant, I completely thought of it differently". This, I think is what makes discussion in classes so valuable.