#efficientreading

I use a scan reading task from Pat Thomson aka Patter in my session on Efficient Reading and Developing Your Literature Review. Scan-reading is a really useful tool to get an overview without wasting huge amounts of time reading entire articles only to find out they aren’t relevant to your research.

The task works as follows.

I ask the students to get in to pairs, and give each person a copy of an article. Either:

How are doctoral students supervised? Concepts of doctoral research supervision by Anne Lee, or

‘It’s a PhD, not a Nobel Prize’: How experienced examiners assess researcher theses by Gerry Mullins and Margaret Kiley

I use these articles to avoid disciplinary specificity - I teach to multi-disciplinary groups - whilst giving them something to read that is relevant to them and (hopefully) interesting.

Next, I give them 10 minutes to follow Patter’s approach to scan reading as published on her blog:

Read the title

Read the abstract

Read the introduction, the headings, the first and last sentence of every paragraph and the conclusion 

                                                                                       (Thomson, 2012)

They then have 10 minutes (5 minutes each) to give an overview of the article content to their partner.

The aim of the task if to get them to think about the amount of information they can absorb through scan reading. Where decisions need to be made about relevance of material, this is really useful. It can also be adapted depending on your subject area and/or priorities - for instance you might want include reading figures or tables in your scan.