Active Reading

Week 3, Reading task

I found out by reading the paper 'Using Student-Constructed Questions to Encourage Active Reading' written by Ernest Balajthy, different learning activities and how we as students can use these during reading tasks that may seem tedious or uninteresting. 

I especially trusted this article because it was published by the International Literacy Association and Wiley in February of 1984.

I had learned that some studies suggest that retention is automatic with comprehension or it can be influenced by interacting factors. It has been said that there are four factors of interactive learning from the nature of the material, the characteristics of the learner, the learning activities applied to the task by which learning is measured. 

I found it quite interesting that studies have said that retention can vary quantitatively and qualitatively when one of the four factors changes. 

I can understand that questioning as a learning activity can improve your motivation and work quality. It has also been acknowledged by Thorndike in 1917 questioning yourself can improve text retention. What I could relate to are the acronym study techniques. I had learned to do this during my leaving certificate, especially when I was studying business and it was a lot of theory and acronyms had helped make studying business easier. 

There is a study by Weinstein in 1978 that says cognitive learning strategies enhance self-awareness when the reader realizes the relationship between cognitive resources and the learning situation. 

I thoroughly found the self-questioning study exceptionally interesting considering I have never studied this way. I find that being our own self-motivator can truly make studying far more successful since we have a set goal we actually want to achieve. 

By looking at the self-questioning teaching strategies, I thought that a lot of them are super useful and should be more known. 

Although that sentence analysis seems quite simple, it can be a very useful tool while reading and studying. 

Things that involve the student such as student-led questions, group competition, and question circles make students feel included and more motivated to work. I had always enjoyed working with other people since it feels like we’re working as a team and aiming towards the same goal. 

To conclude, I believe that the target audience for this article would be any sort of school or college student. This paper can be seen as quite universal and the methods mentioned can be used by everyone. 

I learned a lot about the use of self-questioning as a learning activity. I found it vastly interesting to find out stuff that seems very common sense but isn’t too known to the world. 

The most challenging thing I discovered in this reading task is trying to gather all the information and try to expand it to explain it.