Citation

Hallstead, Tracy M., and Glenda Pritchett . “Reading: The Bridge to Everywhere .” Double Helix, vol. 1, 2013, pp. 1–12., qudoublehelixjournal.org/index.php/dh/article/view/9/88.

Summary

Tracy Hallstead and Glenda Pritchett’s “Reading: The Bridge to Everywhere” begins with the mostly accepted academic worldview of student writing as “evidence of expertise” within individual disciplines. They highlight the product of writing itself as chief player in the evaluating of students, which subsequently directs where student cognitive energies are focused. They go on to argue, in their introduction, that this creates a divide between the dual necessary efforts of reading and writing, and serves to diminish the role of reading as intrinsically tied to writing assignments. The common response to reading assignments is often that they are boring, frustrating, or somehow unrelated to their attached writing assignments; Hallstead and Pritchett quote Johnson and Carpenter’s claim that this is mostly due to an underprepared or misprepared mindset. A mindset, they claim, that can be better understood and reworked to better serve students’ metacognitive activity while reading, which will ultimately help to produce higher quality writing. There are four distinct “barriers” to effective college level reading, and the paper is structured in such a way that details and offers alternative methodologies for each common difficulty.

The first problem, or “barrier,” involves the base student perspective that tends to discount the fundamental importance of reading. Students often times approach assigned reading with the mindset that it doesn’t numerically compare to papers or assignments that are graded and inevitably weighed to determine a final grade. Integrating grading by way of requiring annotations significantly changes this initial attitude. Quinnipiac University’s Writing Across the Curriculum pedagogy bases itself on a “concentric” thinking model that focuses on three critical thinking skills that help students write in-depth annotations. These include prioritizing (choosing which ideas are key to the text), translating (summarizing ideas in one’s own words), and analogizing (making connections between those ideas to different texts and realms outside the piece being read). This can be a useful model, but the assessment portion of the assignment should be enforced.

Problem two outlines the lack of meaning-making when students read. They get “stuck in the weeds,” and rely on verbatim recall or rote memorization when they encounter difficult passages. Inconsequential details are absorbed, and student focus on the text’s big picture is shifted to specific, often unimportant minor aspects. Metacognition should be encouraged by way of breaking down all reading processes into basic questions that can be answered when students inevitably encounter difficult, which include: What am I being asked to do in this reading?, What do I already know about the subject matter?, Where are the limits of my understanding?, What strategies can I use to process this information?, and How can I evaluate my understanding of this reading when I’m finished with it? An emphasis should be placed by instructors, as well, that reading comprehension is less about being an inherently “good” or “bad” reader, but rather that there are available strategies to navigate through difficult.

Problem three: “Students’ Over-Reliance on Memory Results in Commonplaces.” Students will frequently rely on prior knowledge or commonplaces to fill in the gaps of what they don’t understand while reading, which acts as a kind of shortcut to deconstructing difficult passages. Mental flexibility is required to disrupt commonplaces, and the effort required to truly think critically while reading is immense, resulting in frustration. One example using students using commonplaces is offered: in a Quinnipiac University English course, students where asked to explain why a literary villain qualifies as a “monster,” and resulting answers relied heavily on base commonplace definitions of “monster.” If students are offered a “safe space” in which they can question commonplaces alongside what they are reading, they are then given the opportunity to explore new avenues and acquire new knowledge without the frustration that they will be wrong or right in their answers.

And the final barrier: students failing to complete reading assignments. Frustration will likely lead to students feeling as if they have used up all available cognitive resources, and that the only thing left to do is give up. Persistence can result in reasoning one’s way through a problem, and motivation to persist happens when students experience success solving small problems found throughout their reading. Offering problems to solve while students read is a reliable method to encourage persistence, but the difficult level of those problems must be moderate. Too easy and the student will be bored, and too complex will again add to frustration. Exploring all reading as a kind of story, and framing questions to fit that mode, is a way of creating an effective linearity to problem solving; one can form questions using recognizable phrases such as causality, conflict, character, and complication in order to do this.

Hallstead and Pritchett conclude by saying that the best reading experiences create meaning that solidifies concepts and builds new knowledge. This kind of connection in reading can be understood as a bridge being formed, and the durability of that bridge requires specific tools, such as annotations, metacognitive questioning, utilizing frustration as a kind of opportunity, and applying narrative frameworks to ask and answer questions.

Quotes

“Passive, linear reading and memorization are examples of surface-learning approaches in which students move their eyes across words and sentences from the beginning to the end of a text but process little cognitively.” (1)

“Professors and learning center specialists are familiar with the bewildered student who received A’s and B’s in high school yet finds herself thoroughly flummoxed by the college classroom. And while students tend to locate the cause of their anxiety in specific assignments or tests, often thought of as end products, they and we must not overlook the role of reading in the learning experience.” (1)

“In fact, a surprising number of students approach their assigned reading as if it does not count at all; it means little compared to the “real” graded work of papers or tests: No grade, no serious assignment. Thus motivating students to read is the first challenge the professor must address.” (2)

“To further encourage student annotation of texts, peer mentors (called “peer catalysts” in the QU Seminar Series) who were once exemplary QU 101 students themselves are employed by the

Quinnipiac University Learning Commons to attend QU 101 with the current students and to help facilitate annotation-based discussion and other learning activities. Peer catalysts are explicitly trained to offer suggestions for annotations and to provide examples of their own successful annotations.” (4)

“When they focus merely on task completion rather than on making meaning, students get stuck in the weeds—entangled in irrelevant, disconnected details from their reading.” (5)

“The reader does not allow gaps in her comprehension to accumulate as she progresses through a text. Rather, her consciousness of these gaps creates an uneasiness that she tends to tackle and resolve before moving on to the next passage. For instance, a metacognitive reader will not skip by an unfamiliar vocabulary word. Instead, fully aware of the limits of her understanding and beneficially irritated by them, she will use surrounding words and sentences and a dictionary to define the word and connect it to its context, thus gaining understanding of a difficult passage before moving on to the next.” (6)

“In all, it is important for instructors to stress to their students that reading comprehension is not based upon students being good readers or bad readers, but that successful readers strategize their way through difficulty. This point can be especially encouraging for readers with learning disabilities, for whom comprehension does not come naturally but can be achieved through annotation and metacognitive work.” (7)

“The mental flexibility required to disrupt commonplaces is hard-won. In an attempt to oversimplify ideas and ignore messy contradictions, possibilities, and implications, the brain continually defaults to memory, however flawed.” (7)

“Because “thinking is the hardest work there is,” students experience peak frustration at the very point we require them to reason their way from problem to solution in their reading. The commonplace is a painless means for evading such frustration. Our experience with trite essays or with commonsense but incorrect answers on tests illustrates that memory is not necessarily problem-solving and can actually short-circuit the process.” (8)

“The best reading experiences create meaning that solidifies concepts and builds new knowledge. Through reading, students form a bridge—one concept at a time—that connects not only the ideas in their disciplines, but those between disciplines. Building a durable bridge takes time, yet powerful tools can help the process along: writing annotations that require interaction with the reading, asking metacognitive questions to monitor thinking, harnessing frustration as an opportunity for learning, and applying story as a scaffold for moderate-level problem solving.

Built with these tools, the bridge can be sturdy indeed.” (11)

Reflection

Though the reading for our curriculum is relatively light, the Debrah Brandt article was certainly a struggle for some of my students. Our implementing an assigned says/does outline is very much is line with what Hallstead and Pritchett are advocating here, and I almost wish I had added a few more guiding assignments to go along with the reading. Because so much of this class hinges on understanding the concept and implications of literacy, I felt that getting the most out of Brandt was imperative.

This makes me appreciate the emphasis that Hallstead and Pritchett place on reading, and especially appreciate the very clear-cut techniques they outline for how to improve metacognitive analysis from students. I’m partly skeptical, however, that much of these techniques are rooted in foregrounding reading as a graded assignment. These techniques, I feel, have to be introduced and put into practice in a way that won’t immediately correlate the work of reading analysis with the work of essay writing.

I say this mostly because I think there reading comprehension tools discussed here that can be tremendously important for students to learn, and I partly believe that enforcing them too harshly could result in a similar lethargic attitude that students already have towards standard writing conventions. Framing difficult reading, regardless of the subtext matter or context, in a narrative framework is especially important. I even find that many students naturally do this without being taught it, and is an encouraging tool when they otherwise don’t quite grasp the information they’re taking in.

I would also advocate implementing the kind of information shown here about reliance of memory and commonplaces to be something that is directly discussed in classrooms involving any sort of reading. To have that kind of direct, even scientific understanding delivered via the instructor, even if some students feel it doesn’t particularly apply to them, is something that I think would attract natural curiosity. And curiosity that is self-motivated is ultimately the most powerful advocate for any attempt towards intensive reading.