Active Reading — Demonstration
Using active reading strategies can help you with all of your reading assignments in college.
Now that you’ve read about some active reading strategies, let’s see them in action. In the following 5-minute video, I practice some of my favorite active reading strategies on a news article on the Huffington Post website. It’s about a controversy related to a concept called growth mindset, which you can find out more about on other areas of this website.
Active Reading — Practice
Just because a concept like growth mindset has a lot of research backing it up doesn’t mean it’s perfect or that everyone in the academic community accepts it without question. One education researcher who has criticized Dweck’s theory is Luke Wood, a professor at San Diego State University.
We’ve started looking at the article already, but you can practice active reading strategies by reading the full Huffington Post article yourself. As you read, consider the “larger conversation” about growth mindset that’s happening: Luke Wood is basically responding to Carol Dweck’s argument with his own.
It’s important to note that there’s a mistake in the article. There’s a missing quotation from Carol Dweck. After the sentence “Specifically, Carol Dweck (who advanced the concept) has vigorously argued” should be the following quotation:
[W]e can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don’t do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in: their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.
As you read, here are a few questions you can use to guide your note-taking:
- Does Wood completely agree or disagree with Dweck?
- Does he agree with some of her claims but not others?
- With which claims does he agree?
- With which claims does he disagree?
- Identify the part of the article that tells you whether he agrees or disagrees.
- What’s the main point of the article?
- Summarize Luke Wood’s main points in the article?
- What points from Carol Dweck are included in the article?
“I appreciate the concept, I really do, but I also believe this myopic perspective perpetuates a cancerous idea that tells students you can succeed as long as you work hard while depriving them from messages that affirm their abilities or recognize the external challenges such as racism and oppression that often inhibit their ability to do so.”
– Luke Wood
practicing active reading
Identifying the main point
When reading something for class, it can be helpful to stop and think about the main point or main argument (a.k.a. thesis) of what you’ve read. What would you say is the main point of Adriel Hilton’s article, for example? Here are four possibilities:
- Luke Wood says growth mindset is bad.
- Luke Wood claims that the theory of growth mindset is partially correct but takes issue with its contention that students shouldn’t be praised for their ability.
- Luke Wood’s research shows that praising the ability of boys and men of color is correlated with their success in school.
- Luke Wood has worked with students who’ve never been told they were intelligent and capable.
Being able to quickly sum up the main point of an article or other kind of text is important because it’s often necessary to quickly give readers background information about important sources you’re using in your academic writing. So, if you were writing about this article, you could say something like, “Education researcher Luke Wood argues that the theory of growth mindset is partially correct but takes issue with its contention that students shouldn’t be praised for their ability.”
Photo by Lenin Estrada on Unsplash