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engage in a peer review exercise, by carefully reading and assessing the research design and methodology of an as-yet-unpublished social science research article.Before I began, I picked up a reading from another course titled "How to Read a Book, v4.0" by Paul N. Edwards from the School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
