Learning to Achieve Successful Reading in Postsecondary Settings Is A Matter of Learning Self-Reliance by Mary Bixby, Ed.D
University of Missouri-Columbia

First year college students enrolled in Student Success or First-Year Experience sorts of programs, actually all new college students, have a unique challenge when it comes to developing proficient reading strategies. Students come to college with an array of reading strategies they've developed in their prior schooling--many are useful, but unfortunately many are counterproductive, even harmful!

Part of the challenge of becoming an efficient, proficient college reader involves students unlearning old reading strategies and redefining reading as building a step-by-step process aimed at constructing meaning.

There are tons of exercises out there to help students learn to be more proficient readers. Sometimes advice such as highlighting, reading to answer study guide questions, or reading merely to make flashcards is not the best advice to give a student for the first read. Reading is problem solving, and there are two basic kinds of reading problems: those on the page and those off the page. All readers must strategically control both sorts of problems.

Students come to college awfully detail-driven, and yet you must quickly understand that reading in college has to begin with a basic understanding of the main ideas first, before you attempt to digest (god forbid rote memorize) the details. Therefore you must enter the text at the level of understanding that your background allows. If you have a poor background in biology, for example, you may be utterly lost in a college biology text. I'd suggest getting a high school text to start with, so that you can bridge the gap between what you know and what you're expected to comprehend in college. We aren't always ready to read everything we're told to read. I remember how I feel every year when I get the new forms from the IRS! Talk about an unfriendly text! Setting Purposes: On Your Own

The biggest challenge of reading is that for the most part, the academic reading most students have done has been guided by other peoples' purposes; i. e. to read for the end of chapter questions, to fill in a teacher-made worksheet or study guide, and/or to read for details, such as terms and their definitions. Now here you are in college, where teachers require an expensive 400-page, dense text, and all they really tell you is that the test is in five weeks and that you need to know everything. The challenge for students and teachers of students is to understand that students must use their backgrounds of experience, cues from their lecture notes and other teacher-provided information that is no doubt not a worksheet, to infer what may be the important information to read for and understand first. In other words, you must develop self-reliance as college readers. Gone are the days of worksheets!

I often tell students that the closest thing to a study guide for the text in college is a very good noteset from lecture. Students should also seek out others who have had their particular instructors to get a sense of what the instructors value and stress. Reading is not always an individual task. Students eventually discover that college tests come from a mysterious blend of teacher-talk and assigned reading, and while the instructors understand how the sources link, the students may not see the connections and it is the work that they do to reconcile the notes with the readings that will ultimately result in making sense out of the material!! A favorite reading theorist of mine, Frank Smith, is right on when he advises to make understanding the main ideas a first priority, and if comprehension is good, memory takes care of itself.

To work on reading self-reliance, I offer the following exercise, the point of which is that students possess their own solutions to their reading problems, you just have to be versatile and strategic, and to forget about high school reading practices!

Directions: Students should work with partners or small groups to brainstorm solutions to these inevitable reading problems. Then, as a group, discuss the ideas that you come up with.

By working together to solve these problems you're bound to come up with some workable solutions. Experiment a little. If you try everything you can think of and you're still having trouble, talk things over with an instructor or a with a counselor in the Learning Center.

Reading in college requires a new approach and a different set of skill than you may be used to using. But if you understand the differences, experiment with new reading strategies and work diligently to break away from the methods of the past, you'll be reading like a true scholar in no time flat.