Extra is Better
Studies have attempted to construct a framework that can enhance reading comprehension as well as the use of self-regulated strategies. Dobson claims that there are certain strategies that can help students, but teachers do not teach them because they are time consuming. So as Haas claims, students are doing less because they are just reading for information instead of content. A reason for this may be that the students do not understand certain words and cannot think rhetorically. Since reading comprehension is very complex, you need to be able to make inferences. Kendeou and his partners claim that the more knowledge you have the better inferences you can make while reading.
The connections between all these articles is that they all explain a way to approach reading like making inferences, reading rhetorically, or following steps to understand the reading, and comparing the story to your experiences. They differed in the way on how they approach reading comprehension. These resources did not study students who take notes, or students that draw pictures. Students who do all these strategies that I mentioned are important because their notes show how the content they read makes sense to them. Their strategies can create an understanding on how people with disabilities create their own methods of comprehending literature. I am a visual learner, so I must create my own methods of learning, so I decided to observe how my notetaking affected the comprehension of a reading.
To get insight on how others take notes, I picked generally students that were aiming for A's. Since the medical field is the most competitive field, I chose some students from a biology course. I also chose a student with an Education major and one from History. Including my own notes, I made sure to ask if they were aiming for an A and if the class they were taking notes for was relevant to them.
As I gathered notes from my peers, I thought to myself "Maybe I'm the only one that goes extra on my notes". They explained how they indeed did use post-its, highlighters and other strategies while reading but they mostly just reviewed what they read. As I looked through their notes and compared them to their grades, I saw a lot asterisks and arrows to emphasize more on their points. It should also be noted that some people do not write notes anymore. Instead, they use their laptops to take notes on the teacher’s PowerPoints. I have tried that, but it did not really help when I studied because I could not add post-it notes to point out what really was important.
From my analysis, I can tell that some of the owners of the notes are visual learners because they draw pictures, or they have actual pictures of what they are reading so that they can understand it more clearly. I was also able to acknowledge the different note-taking strategies that many of them had. It went from Cornell notes, to just arrows all over the place pointing to ideas and boxes with definitions on words that were not yet comprehended. They explained that going over the notes and making connections throughout them helped them better understand the subject. In my case, I was able to improve my test scores and after this study I hope to improve note-taking to influence others.
After conducting this study, I can now say that notes affect the way we comprehend our reading by letting us highlight the major points and helps us create images in our minds to help us understand literature. Some people comprehend things when they are being “extra” with their notes. It may be time consuming, but if they are really striving for that "A", they are going to do whatever it takes. Adding a little color to your notes will help the important words to stand out more. My solution is important because there are a lot of people with learning and mental disabilities. This applies to visual learners, because in a way it helps them grasp on to what they are trying to learn. My research can help in creating new ways of taking notes. I would like for my audience to use my data and analyzation to understand how others use their notes to comprehend what they are reading so that maybe they can do the same. By being “extra” you go the extra mile in making your notes colorful by adding extra details and creating different fonts to emphasize important things. By doing this I succeeded in getting better scores on tests. I started writing on colored paper using my favorite colored pens. As I was taking my test I would picture my notes and I could visualize the important key points to compare and make connections. So, how do notes help us comprehend what we are reading? By allowing us to visualize and make inferences to understand academic topics.
Work Cited Page
-Haas, Christina, and Linda Flower. "Rhetorical Reading Strategies and the Construction of
Meaning." College Composition and Communication 39.2 (1988): 167. Web.
-Kendeou, Panayiota, Kristen L. McMaster, and Theodore J. Christ. "Reading Comprehension:
Core Components and Processes." (n.d.): n. pag. Web
-Scharlach, Tabatha Dobson. “START Comprehending: Students and Teachers Actively Reading
Text.” The Reading Teacher, vol. 62, no. 1, 2008, pp. 20–31., doi:10.1598/rt.62.1.3.
