CREDIT COURSES
Find out more about bringing one or both of these fine courses to your campus: contact us.
Advanced Reading Strategies for College Success Course: 28 Strategies that Make a Difference
A course to teach you essential and scholarly reading strategies, to apply them with metacognitive awareness, and to use flexible reading rates with your academic reading. It has been offered as a traditional course and as a flipped course.
Target audience: college upperclassmen, graduate students, and diligent underclassmen.
As now constituted, two-credit hour course teaches 28 strategies: 50 minutes twice a week.
Flipped Model: Before class you read about the strategy in handbook, watch a demonstration of it, and practice it on your own text. During class you debrief out-of-class learning experiences, are coached while practicing strategies on texts for your other classes, debrief the practice session, and have occasional speeding up labs and strategy-integration days. After class you practice on your own texts.
The Traditional Model: Same as the Flipped Model except you only read about the strategy before class, and during class, you do the same plus review the strategy more and watch a short demonstration. After class you watch the full video demonstration and practice on your own texts. This has been offered as an 80-minute class twice a week with a built-in speeding-up lab, held the last 20 minutes of class.
In both versions, you learn ten principles for speeding up your academic reading. You also learn and practice 10 types of speeding-up drills using a pacing device: the Increase App or ReadMateTM. Our purpose is less about your becoming a speed reader and more about helping you complete your challenging academic texts with good understanding and in a timely way.
Growing out of our research with expert readers and college readers, we have developed, taught, and refined the course Advanced Reading Strategies for College Success. Both course formats (traditional and flipped) are hands-on workshops where you learn and practice strategies to process texts to make sense, remember, speed up when appropriate, and think critically and creatively.
Each course format addresses five essential questions:
1. What effective strategies can I use before, during, and after reading to actively construct meaning and remember important information?
2. How can I speed up my reading while being sure I understand the important points?
3. How do I adapt the reading strategies to the wide variety of texts I have to read and under what conditions, why, and how could I integrate and adapt each strategy?
4. What can I do to avoid undue stress about my reading assignments and instead fully engage in the reading experience with skill and confidence?
5. What can I do to become a more scholarly, critical, and creative reader of academic texts?
In this course offered since 2007 we have witnessed significant student progress in comprehension, reading rate, reading attitude, and metacognitive awareness. Click here for research results.
Materials for this course include the Learn More & Read Faster Handbook and a pacing device.
- The handbook Learn More & Read Faster, 4th© 2021, 358 pages. Order here.
- A pacing device to increase your reading rate. Choose ONE of these:
- The Increase App: available for your smart phone at https://increaseapp.com. For questions, e-mail: support@increaseapp.com; cost: $9.99. OR
- The ReadMate:a handheld device about the size of a small cassette player is not longer being produced, but you might be able to find a used one on the internet, eBay, etc.
Surviving College Reading Course: 16 Strategies that Make a Difference
Target audience: college underclassmen, college-bound high school students, and others wanting to learn well the basics of academic reading with more support. Also this course has been used for targeted populations at English Language Centers, Student Athlete Academic Centers, Academic Support Offices, and Accessibility Centers.
Purpose: to teach readers to learn and apply with metacognitive awareness essential reading strategies and to speed up their academic reading.
A two-credit course (50 minutes) with two lessons devoted to each of 16 strategies. It has also taught as a 100-minute class once a week.
Because of the need to support students new to the demands of college reading and those struggling with their reading loads, we developed Surviving College Reading to help these students read their academic texts in a timely manner with good understanding, so they are able to discuss and remember well what they read. The course follows the gradual release of responsibility model (Vygotsky) where students learn a strategy by participating in explanations, demonstrations, and shared practice (Day 1) and debriefing, coached practice, and speeding up drills (Day 2), all with an emphasis on metacognitive awareness. The course teaches fewer strategies and gives more support for each than does the advanced course.
Students learn to speed up their academic reading by practicing six types of drills using a pacing device.
The course Surviving College Reading addresses four questions:
1. What few key strategies can I use before, during, and after reading to actively construct meaning and remember important information?
2. How can I speed up my reading of academic texts and still understand the important points?
3. How do I adapt the reading strategies to the wide variety of texts I read in the disciplines?
4. What can I do to avoid undue stress about my reading assignments and, instead, enter the reading experience with engagement and confidence?
Materials for this course include the Surviving College Reading Handbook and a pacing device:
- The handbook Surviving College Reading, 2nd ed. © 2016, 260 pages. Order here.
- A pacing device to increase your reading rate. Choose ONE of these:
- The Increase App: available for your smart phone at https://increaseapp.com. For questions, e-mail: support@increaseapp.com; cost: $9.99. OR
- The ReadMate:a handheld device about the size of a small cassette player is not longer being produced, but you might be able to find a used one on the internet, eBay, etc.
For each course, Advanced Reading Strategies for College Success and Surviving College Reading, we supply lesson plans, handbook, demonstrations, ThinkSheets to initially guide readers through the steps for doing the strategies, pre/post assessments, record-keeping materials such as reading logs and speeding-up charts, online training for instructors, sample syllabus, and suggested calendar, etc. Contact us for details.