ACTIVE READING AND THINKING SKILLS

Active reading is part of a reading comprehension strategy that should also include pre-
reading anActive reading means the reader is engaged in the text that he or she is reading.

Purpose
College reading is more complex than high school reading. You are expected to read
higher volumes and complete challenges independently. You have to digest, analyze, and
apply what you've read without much guidance. In order to read effectively in college, it is
important that you understand the goal of the reading (i.e., reading with a purpose), and you
understand and choose the best reading strategies for the task.
In this tutorial, you will learn about active reading skills. These skills will help you to
recall and apply information you obtain through printed text. Active reading has many
benefits. First and foremost, through previewing, reading, and reviewing, it gets you involved
in the material.
When you read to collect data and retain information, active reading skills act as a catalyst
for critical thinking skills that must be applied in a systematic way. Formulating questions
about what you have read leads to analyzing purposes and assumptions. What is the intent or
agenda of the author and his/her point of view? Ultimately, this process helps you to
understand and retain what you read and assists you in mastering academic reading. This
mastery leads to a successful college experience, and will also serve you well in your future
profession.

Goals and Objectives

The overall goal of this tutorial is to introduce you to active reading. This tutorial
addresses communications skills, requires active use of writing, speaking, and other forms of
self-expression, and provides opportunities for information gathering, synthesis, and analysis
in solving problems and in critical thinking. When you have completed this tutorial, you
should be able to:
 Describe active reading skills and their importance
 Reflect upon and self-assess your current use of active reading skills
 Engage in and apply active reading skills
 Identify strategies for taking notes and using underlining in readings
Reading Strategies
Strategies differ from reader to reader. The same reader may use different strategies for
different contexts because their purpose for reading changes. Ask yourself “why am I
reading?” and “what am I reading?” when deciding which strategies to try.

Before reading
 Establish your purpose for reading
 Speculate about the author’s purpose for writing
 Review what you already know and want to learn about the topic (see the guides
below).
 Preview the text to get an overview of its structure, looking at headings, figures,
tables, glossary, etc.
 Predict the contents of the text and pose questions about it. If the authors have
provided discussion questions, read them and write them on a note-taking sheet.
 Note any discussion questions that have been provided (sometimes at the end of the
text).
 Sample pre-reading guides – K-W-L guide.
 Critical reading questionnaire.

During reading
 Annotate and mark (sparingly) sections of the text to easily recall important or
interesting ideas
 Check your predictions and find answers to posed questions
 Use headings and transition words to identify relationships in the text
 Create a vocabulary list of other unfamiliar words to define later
 Try to infer unfamiliar words’ meanings by identifying their relationship to the main
idea
 Connect the text to what you already know about the topic
 Take breaks (split the text into segments if necessary)
 Sample annotated texts – Journal article · Book chapter excerpt

After reading
 Summarize the text in your own words (note what you learned, impressions, and
reactions) in an outline, concept map, or matrix (for several texts)
 Talk to someone about the author’s ideas to check your comprehension
  Identify and reread difficult parts of the text
 Define words on your vocabulary list (try a learner’s dictionary) and practice using
them
 Sample graphic organizers – Concept map · Literature review matrix

Critical thinking/ Thinking skills

Critical thinking is a way of thinking, understanding and expressing ourselves. See the
Critical thinking checklist.
Critical thinking is about using your ability to reason. It's about being active in your
learning and questioning ideas, arguments and findings.
In an academic argument ideas are organised into a line of reasoning. The writer aims to
persuade the reader that their point of view is valid. Being able to understand and create
structured, reasoned arguments is central to critical thinking.
Try to constantly evaluate what you read, hear, think, experience and observe. Assess how
well ideas, statements, claims, arguments and findings are backed up so that you can make a
reasoned judgement about how convincing they are.

Criticising the experts

At first, students often feel anxious about criticising ideas that they come across in their
reading or in lectures. They feel that it's disrespectful to challenge established academics.
In fact, it is essential to critique what you read - but always make sure you back up your
argument with evidence.
Critical thinking means analysing ideas, observations, experience and reasons, exploring
the evidence and carefully considering whether something makes sense and is accurate.
You might consider whether ideas or findings can be applied in a particular context and, if
so, how useful or effective this would be. Often, you will compare and contrast what
academics say about a subject so you can come up with your own argument.

Using critical thinking skills

You will need to demonstrate your critical thinking skills in various ways:
 Critical reading
Ask questions about the text as you read. This will keep you focused and help you
to understand it.
  Evaluating arguments
When reading a text containing an argument, try to evaluate whether it makes
sense and is well supported. See Evaluating arguments.
 Critical writing
Make sure that your writing is clear and your argument well structured.
See Critical essay writing.

When you are reading to collect data and retain information, critical thinking skills should
be applied in a systematic way. This is different than passively reading something merely for
entertainment in which the story unfolds like a movie in your mind. As you begin to apply
active reading skills to reading for entertainment, you may find the movie in your mind
becomes more enriched. Properly applied active reading skills will better enable you to recall
and apply information you read.

Example of academic reading, Text focus: education

Indonesia struggles to improve education quality

With his flagship Indonesian Smart Card (KIP) program, President Joko “Jokowi”
Widodo has managed to further expand children’s access to basic education, imitating the
success of his predecessors since Soeharto.

The country, however, has achieved little in its attempts to improve its education
standards, with most Indonesian children still doing badly in math, science and reading,
according to the 2015 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey
conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In
2016, the government, skeptical of the global assessments on the country’s education quality,
decided to sponsor a national survey called the Indonesia National Assessment Program
(INAP) to counter the 2015 results of PISA. The result was another reality check for
Indonesian education. PISA found 75.7 percent of Indonesian students to be poor in science,
mathematics and reading, while the administration’s INAP showed a slightly lower figure of
73.61 percent.

“Our conclusion was that we had to work harder in preparing our teachers, providing
better school facilities and preparing our students,” said Education and Culture Minister
Muhadjir Effendy in a recent interview with The Jakarta Post, referring to the INAP results.
The efforts to expand access to education have resulted in a significant increase in
Indonesia’s gross school enrollment rates in various education levels between 1972 and 2015.
Through programs like KIP, the government hopes that economic constraints will no longer
prevent children from attending schools.

But that is not enough, says Totok Amien Sofijanto, an education observer from
Paramadina University in Jakarta. “We have to have programs that can improve quality in
schools,” he said. Muhadjir, who replaced Anies Baswedan in 2016, said one major cause of
poor learning quality in Indonesia was the long-standing mishandling of teachers.
“Our teachers have become disconnected from teaching standards. For many years,
teachers have not been provided with information related to teaching standards,” Muhadjir
said. Teacher reform, in fact, has long been an integral part of the whole education reform,
but it has yet to show promising results.

In 2005, the government introduced a teacher-certification program aimed primarily

at improving teacher welfare. While the program has increased teacher salaries “considerably
over the past decade” it has resulted in no “observable improvements in learning outcomes”,
a 2013 study by the World Bank concluded.

“We have to admit that students’ learning outcomes and capability to absorb learning
need to be improved and are still far from desirable,” Muhadjir said.
He added, however, that, “the problem of quality and the problem of access to quality
education must be addressed separately.” Muhadjir argued that improving the quality of
Indonesian students could not be done solely by his ministry, pointing to the role of local
administrations, which have gained a much greater role in policymaking since 1998 through
decentralization.

The minister has repeatedly lamented the fact that of the 34 provinces in the country,
Jakarta remains the only province to have allocated more than 20 percent of its budget for
education. A recent Lowy Institute study authored by Australian researcher Andrew Rosser,
which offers a new theory on why Indonesia’s education is failing, may partly corroborate the
minister’s arguments on the need for strong national collaboration to fix national education.

The study acknowledges that low government spending, quality of teachers,

discouraging incentive systems and poor government management of public education
institutions have hampered efforts to improve education quality, but its author believes that
the underlying cause of Indonesia’s failure to create a quality education system is more
political and economic in nature.

While the fall of Soeharto led to a clearer division of power between Jakarta and
regions, it failed to completely root out the influence of “bureaucratic and corporate forces
that dominated the New Order” in sectors including in education, according to the study.
These forces “have had little interest in the development of a high-quality education system
producing strong learning outcomes,” it says. Commenting on the argument, Totok, the
Paramadina analyst, said education “ideally must be free from the influence of politics”. The
problem, however, was that teachers have been seen as strong political capital, given their
large numbers. “Some 60 percent of our civil servants are teachers. If you look at this large
number, this is political capital. You cannot underestimate the power of teachers as a pressure
group. That is realpolitik,” Totok said.
 FULL REFERENCE

http://tutorials.istudy.psu.edu/activereading.

http://rasmussen.libanswers.com/faq/32583.

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillshub.

https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2018/04/09/indonesia-struggles-improve-education-
quality.

https://writingcenter.unc.edu/esl/resources/academic-reading-strategies.