1. Effective Reading Strategies
Kortschak Center for Learning and Creativity
Hello and welcome to a workshop on effective reading strategies provided by Kortschak Center for Learning and Creativity. My name Jessica Anguiano and I will be guiding you through this workshop.

2. Learning Outcomes: By completing this workshop, you will be able to:
Assess effective reading strategies
Differentiate between passive reading and active reading
Incorporate strategies to better understand and efficiently break down reading material
During this workshop, you will learn how to assess effective reading strategies, differentiate between passive reading and active reading, and incorporate strategies to better understand and efficiently break down reading material.

3. Before Reading: Factual: Descriptive, informational, and procedural
Persuasive: Exposition, discussion, and a mixture of facts supporting one’s opinion
Literary: Narrative, analysis about a narrative or poem
Before reading, it’s important to identify the type of text you will be reading. Identifying the type of text you are reading can give you a better idea of how information is presented and understood. For example, a scientific article is written differently than a literary narrative piece. It may also be written toward a certain audience. There are generally three types of text you will encounter: factual, persuasive, and literary.
Factual texts are generally informational texts, use visual aids like graphs and diagrams, and may also be used to elaborate on information being shared.
Persuasive texts may be informational but also conveys information in a way that tries to persuade the audience in agreeing with the information presented.
Literary texts are creative. They can come in the form of non-fiction or fiction novels, short stories, poems, and sometimes can be presented in an abstract manner.

4. While Reading: Predict Question and Infer Meaning Visualize
Make Connections
While reading, it is important to make predictions, actively ask questions, infer meaning, visualize what is being described, and make connections between the content you are reading with what you have learned in the past.
Research shows content is more readily stored and therefore learned more effectively when the reader incorporates meaningingful learning strategies such as these: predicting, questioning and inferring meaning, visualizing, and making connections.

5. Predicting: The process of prediction helps improve understanding:
Make prediction on findings
Evaluate prediction
Revise prediction
Connect experience and prior knowledge to make predictions and formulate ideas while reading. While reading, you can make predictions to what the reading is going to communicate. Once the text has been read, revising original predictions can give an indication of your initial ideas and how they have changed throughout the course of the reading.
By doing this, your can track your knowledge and make more accurate predictions in the future.

6. Questioning and Inferring:
Reading between the lines:
Identify underlying themes
Draw working conclusions
Identify and analyze a relationship between two or more concepts
While reading, ask yourself questions to help construct meaning, enhance understanding, and find working conclusions.
By being inquisitive, you actively engage with the reading.
This technique can be applied to a variety of different readings.
For example, I began to read a chapter in a novel. I have already gone through the process of predicting what I am going to learn based on what I have learned from the previous chapters. The next step is to go through the reading and identify themes within the novel. My initial predictions of what will happen may be wrong, however I am engaging with the text and I am actively looking for answers.

7. Visualization: Create an interpretation of the text, visualize:
Settings, characters, and actions
Graphs, diagrams, and processes
Depending on the type of text being read, constructing a visualization of what is being read may help you to remember the content. Grouping information, parts of graphs, or even formulaic information can help create your own interpretation of scenes and/or information being conveyed.

8. Making Connections: Three ways to help make meaningful connections:
Underline important content
Summarize content, create personal analogies
Teaching the material to someone else
Selecting main ideas and clustering content
Along with predicting, questioning, and visualizing, it is important to make further connections. Underlining and distinguishing important content is important. This can be done by noting main ideas, writing down important themes, paying attention to bold-faced text, and grouping ideas into smaller groups.
By summarizing information into your own words and then explaining the material to someone else, it can help solidify information.
Make sure to check out other resources provided through the Kortschak Center for Learning and Creativity for more detailed information. They can be found on our tools and resources page as well as under other on-demand workshops.

9. References
Dembo, M.H. & Seli, H. (2016). Motivation and learning strategies for college success. Publication
manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th Edition. Washington, D.C. American
Psychological Association.
Duke, N. K. & Pearson, (2005).Effective practices for developing reading comprehension. Retrieved
from infolit/trainers/comprehe_strategies.pdf
Küçükoglu, H. (2012). Improving reading skills through effective reading strategies. Retrieved from