Effective Speed Reading of academic literature

by: D-Eva Project

An online template is created where the learners will have to provide a 200-word summary of 2 academic articles published in peer-reviewed journals related to the project of the traineeship (one summary per article) and a 100-word justification of how useful this paper is for their project. A timer will show to the learners and their coach the time they needed to read the articles and write the summaries and the justification of the usefulness of the papers for their project. After this first activity, the coach of the trainees shares, through an online session, strategies for skimming through an academic text and comprehend it at faster reading speeds. The activity will be repeated twice and the coach will provide feedback after each template submission. The templates of the whole group will be published (anonymously) in the SharePoint space of the traineeship, so everyone can read the summaries and the justification, as well as the feedback from the coach.

Summary of the activity:

Activity takes place in big group with individual assignments

Duration: 6 weeks (the first 6 weeks of the traineeship, when learners engage mostly with academic literature)

Methodology: Big group workshop, individual assignments with personalized feedback, which will be shared to the whole group.

Keywords

Speed reading, applied research, traineeship, literature review, desktop research

Problem justification

The Digital Society School (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) offers a 20 week-traineeship program, which aims to support learners grow their skills and develop their full potential in innovative interactive media. Specifically, every semester, 50 diverse learners participate in this hands-on learning experience, which involves practice-based work with industry partners and applied research. The diversity of our learner population and of the tasks they have to complete leads to significant differences with respect to how learning is shaped by participating in this program. Since this is a every practice-oriented program, it relies on the on-campus interaction of the students with experts in digital transformation, the participation in hands-on workshops and collaborative projects. Every team of learners is assigned to a coach, who guides them throughout the program. Since March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the program has been offered partially or fully online, which has created additional complexity to the learners’ experience. Quantitative and qualitative data collected from our graduates over the last two years has demonstrated that our learners struggle with the search of academic literature when conducting desk Research for their projects. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, with much less contact with academic experts on campus and internet as the only way to find the right Information for their projects, it is more needed that necessary to help them improve this skill. Our graduates have witnessed spending hours reading a full paper, which ends up being useless for their projects. The goal of this e-assessment activity is to enhance learners’ speed-reading skill when searching for academic literature at home for their projects.

Competences

Speed-reading

Academic readings comprehension

Using technology for skills assessment

Assessment strategies and instruments

Strategies:

Identification of the strengths of the learners

Identification of the areas for improvement

Track progress of the learners

Provision of good practice / effective speed-reading examples

Tools:

Online survey

Web-based collaborative platform

Teleconferencing tool

Assessment criteria

Quality of the summaries of the articles

are the entries summarising the main arguments?
are the summaries well-written? (grammatically correct, concise and coherent in style)?
are the summaries following the criteria (200-word long, at least 2)

Quality of the justification of the usefulness of the articles for the traineeship project

is the justification of the usefulness of the articles for the traineeship included?
is the justification well-argued (quality: high, intermediate, low)?
are the justifications following the criteria (100-word long)?

Progress in speed-reading

Is the time spent on reading the articles becoming less? (yes, somehow, no)

Possible variation of the activity: discuss the assessment criteria among all students to make sure they share a common understanding of the quality standards

Description of the feedback

Oral feedback during the online session (synchronous)

Written feedback in the web-based collaborative platform (asynchronous)

Agents involved: learners and coach

Possible variation of the activity: include self-assessment and peer-assessment at some point

Type of digital tools

SharePoint, Jotform, Zoom

Levels of potential digital transformation

Accessible and available: developed lots of times, easy and known

Example of a case

References

Practical guide on how to read faster:

https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/10-ways-increase-your-reading-speed.html

Rayner, Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100615623267

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