By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.
Reading is one thing. Understanding it is another. No joke though. Weâve all read a whole page before without understanding one word on it. Am I right?
Iâm right.
If youâre taking an online course or doing remote learning, understanding what you read can be even harder, because you donât necessarily have a teacher right there to explain it to you or to present the material differently.
Furthermore, it can be hard to understand what you read when youâre not in a classroom setting, because many of us learn more from the class discussions and group conversations than we do from our teacher alone. But if youâre taking an online class or learning remotely, you miss out on those âlearning out loudâ experiences.
If you want this strategy explained in video, then here’s my video tutorial:
So what do we do? How do we actually understand what weâre reading when we are reading it?
Hereâs the answer you donât want to hear: We have to think about what we are reading.
Hereâs how to do that: create on-going reading summaries.
- When youâre reading something dense, like a textbook or an article, stop reading after every paragraph or so to write a 1-2 sentence summary of what you just read. Do not write more than 2 sentences.
- If you canât distill one paragraph into 1 or 2 sentences, you didnât understand it. If you canât write this simple summary, then you have to go back and re-read the paragraph until you can summarize it.
- Write your summaries in the margins. You can do this in an app if youâre reading online, or you can print out the text and write your summaries on paper.
Will this strategy slow down your reading? Yep. Will it annoy you? At times. But will you understand what you read? Abso-freaking-lutely.
Hereâs why this works: The very act of going back to something you just read and thinking about it – to the point where you can summarize it – is learning. Itâs forcing you to slow down and think did I understand that?
Also, at the end of your reading, youâll have a collection of short concise summaries that, when put all together, will be a helpful summary of the entire text. This could come in handy if you need to reference the text later for questions, an essay, or a quiz.
The trick to how to understand what you read has nothing to do with being a genius. Itâs simply a matter of using the right strategies to check in with yourself while you read (this is called metacognition) to see if you really get whatâs happening. Again, we have to think about what we are reading before we will ever understand it.