CAN YOU IMPROVE YOUR READING SKILLS?

(From Reading at Efficient Rates, by Alton L. Raygor and George B. Schick)

It is very popular these days to try to improve reading skills. One sees many announcements in newspapers and elsewhere for courses, materials, and equipment designed to improve reading rate and comprehension. Most often the emphasis is on reading rate. The purpose of this exercise is to give you some idea of what we know from research studies made about people who set out to improve their reading skills. First of all, in the typical reading improvement program the average student will increase his reading rate by approximately 100 percent. That is, he will just about double it. However some people will not gain that much, while others will improve three or four times that much. The average person who is reading about 250 words per minute when he enters a reading improvement program will usually increase this rate to the point where he can comfortably read material at 450 to 500 words per minute.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about comprehension scores. The average person's comprehension will stay about the same. While it is true that people who tend to read more rapidly also tend to get better comprehension scores, it is not necessarily true that if you increase your reading rate you will also increase your comprehension. In fact, research on the topic fails to support such a notion.

Comprehension scores do tend to increase for students who spend a lot of their time working specifically on comprehension skills. However, many reading improvement courses are not designed to focus on specific comprehension skills. Most of the time is spent on increasing the rate. If your primary purpose is to improve comprehension scores, then you need to focus on such things as reading for the main idea, understanding and retaining details, taking a critical view of the material, discovering the organization of the material, and other similar comprehension skills. A great deal of attention needs to be given to these skills to improve them significantly. It is not the purpose of this book to help you to make large gains in comprehension. Expect rather to increase your rate while holding comprehension approximately the same. Of course we know that you will not object if your comprehension scores should increase.

It might be useful here to explain in somewhat more detail the relationship between reading rate and comprehension. One often hears that as you increase your reading rate, comprehension also improves. On the other hand, common sense tells us that if you try to read material too fast you will probably not get as much out of it. If a student attempts to push his reading rate to very high levels without giving sufficient attention to the development of comprehension skills, comprehension will almost certainly suffer. However he will get a fairly good idea of what the material is about and that may be all he wants. We are not suggesting that high rates of reading are not a good idea. We are simply suggesting that if you want to maintain adequate comprehension, you cannot reach the fantastic rates that one sometimes hears about.

TIME:____________

COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS: CIRCLE THE CORRECT ANSWER OR FILL IN THE BLANK

1.      In a typical reading improvement program, the average student will increase his reading rate by

a.       50 percent

b.      200 percent

c.       100 percent

d.      75 percent

2.      A person reading about 250 words per minute will usually read about ___________ words per minute after a reading improvement program.

3.      As the average person increases his rate, his comprehension scores tend to

a.       increase moderately.

b.      just about double.

c.       decrease slightly.

d.      remain about constant

4.      People who read more rapidly tend to

a.       become tired more easily.

b.      get better comprehension scores.

c.       get poorer comprehension scores.

d.      get about the same comprehension scores as people who read more slowly.

5.      The purpose of the book mentioned is to

a.       double your comprehension scores.

b.      increase your reading rate while holding comprehension approximately the same

c.       increase rate and comprehension together.

d.      double your reading rate.