Active Reading: The Key to Educational Success

Reading is widely regarded as a passive process, and this is where the fault lies. Unfortunately, a large part of the edifice of pre-tertiary education is built on this fault line which is vulnerable to eruption. Educators, particularly in these times of sizzling frenzy of technology, always complain that students do not read and even if they do, they do not understand. This means we are not effective readers because today’s students are tomorrow’s educators. Reading is a very much active process, even more active than writing. Until and unless, we change our dogmas towards reading and teach it as an active process, we cannot initiate a useful, effective change in students today and in our society down the line. This article emphasises the importance of active reading and outlines the methods to engage in active reading process for a better understanding of a given text, a useful tool for success in any educational setting.

First and foremost, we need to debunk the myth that reading is a passive process. The idea that reading is a passive process germinates from the misconception that it involves only the eyes to move across the text while the brain processes the words. In reality, reading involves complex cognitive mechanisms such as decoding words, comprehending their meaning, making inferences, and relating the content to the reader’s existing knowledge. Based on these mechanisms, the reader actively constructs meaning, asks questions, draws connections and conclusions, and most importantly engages in critical thinking about the material. In this way, reading is an interactive process between the reader and the text. Moreover, the reader often brings his or her own experiences, emotions, and prior knowledge to the act of reading, which determines the way he or she may interpret and understand the material. This makes reading a dynamic and deeply personalised experience, far from being a passive activity.

During the course of educational journey, students have to read extensively. In today’s print and online world, sometimes it is a Herculean task to narrow down one’s search from a wide array of resources to the most relevant ones. Using skimming and scanning skills, one can hunt down resources for a guaranteed success. These skills involve looking over an abstract, an introduction, a blurb and flipping through the pages quickly and scanning down the page to catch some key information, dates, numerical data etc. In this process, the eye catches sight of key words and information, which can determine whether the material is worth further reading or not. Based on your skimming and scanning, you can make a decision whether to select that source for deeper reading or discard it and move on to the next one. This process can enable you to shortlist the most relevant materials for you in a short time.

After choosing what to read, the next step is active reading, where you shift from skimming and scanning to fully engaging with the text. There are some fundamental features of active reading that are explained here. Note-taking is the skill that involves a reader’s active participation in the process of reading, comprehending and retaining. Note-taking involves a thoughtful awareness of what you are doing and why. As you keep reading, make notes along the way and reflect on those so you can develop your own techniques. The idea is to make note-taking an individual activity, specific to you only. Note-taking could be performed on the text itself, if you own the book. However, if it is a borrowed book, taking notes in your notebook is the only moral option. Engage with the text, play with the text, annotate the text, and raise questions for a better understanding. It is imperative to remember that active reading is like a face-to-face debate in which one argues, counterargues, agrees, disagrees, approves, disapproves, convinces or gets convinced. Ask yourself questions, for example, why is something happening, who is involved, why are they involved, what is the purpose of the text, who is the audience, where does it happen, when does it happen, what is the context and how does it affect you or does it affect you at all or not. Such cross questioning seems more like an active investigation of a criminal in the court or at a police station, but that is the most effective way to get the maximum out of a text. Along with such active questioning, keep on predicting because active reading is also an informed guessing game: what is about to happen, who would be affected, what would be the outcome and how will it impact you. Remember that a text is exactly like a person with whom you interact, and all of these techniques to extract information are a common practice in our day to day lives. Therefore, a text is a living entity as it is written by a living being. Along with that, it is a great idea to summarise in your own words whatever you have understood. It is important to understand and acknowledge that the aim of active reading is not to remember, but to understand. The irony is that when you understand, you remember as well. Therefore, it is a ‘buy one get one free’ package.

When you read actively as outlined in the previous paragraph, you will gather a considerable amount of information. The next stage in active reading process is to organise your information, your notes, in a way that it is effectively and readily accessible to you when you want to dispense it. When you take notes, reference them by adding page number(s) of the source and its author along with the date so you can establish links later on. This is a very personalised process, and everyone could employ different ways of organising their notes. The crucial thing is to organise them.

It must be remembered that active reading does not involve highlighting, as most school students are encouraged to do so. Research has proved that highlighting does more damage than benefit. Although highlighting has become a widespread disease, studies indicate that it provides no advantage beyond simply reading the text with a false hope that one is doing a lot of cognitive work. Contrary to this misconception, some research even suggests that highlighting may hinder the learning process because it draws attention to individual facts, it may hamper the process of making connections and drawing inferences. In order to understand the negative impact of highlighting, we must understand the working mechanism of the brain. Highlighting sends visual input into our brain upon which the brain restricts the focus to the highlighted segments only, ignoring other, sometimes more important parts of a text. In this way, we limit our ideas to the highlighted segments where our attention is forced to engage without an overall comprehensive understanding. The act of highlighting also gives us a false impression of engagement. However, technically speaking, you get engaged with a text when you input your ideas, thoughts or feelings—in the form of notes or annotations—in response to what is written by someone else.

You must remember that a written piece means someone’s thoughts, feelings and ideas. That someone could be different from you in many ways or in some ways. Therefore, when you interact with a text [which is equivalent to interacting with someone], keep agreeing or disagreeing, keep challenging, keep analysing, keep predicting, keep thinking critically and most importantly: keep taking notes. Not only this, keep reflecting about how you should take notes because it evolves until it reaches a stage where it seems the perfect note taking practice. If you are engaging with a text in this manner, you are an active reader.