How to
Improve Your Reading Comprehension as an Adult
The
ability to process and retain information from texts: it’s not just for kids.
Reading comprehension, which has been
defined as “the act of translating text into mental representations”, has
also been described as the ultimate goal of reading. But the bulk of research
on reading comprehension focuses on children. When it comes to adults,
consensus-level findings and proposed suggestions are still emerging.
This
also applies to non-text-based forms of reading. So this article mainly applies
to people reading visually, rather than via listening, say, or Braille. The
suggestions compiled here aren’t exhaustive.
SLOW
YOUR ROLL
The
good news from the research that does exist is that older adults do just as
well as younger adults, or better, in many aspects affecting reading
comprehension. While older adults have more general knowledge they can apply to
a particular situation in a book, which helps them to understand it more
readily, it takes them longer to encode new knowledge. So some aspects of
reading performance do decline with age. Refusing to acknowledge this decline
can worsen understanding.
This
applies, for instance, to ambiguous passages. Older adults need to call on more
of the brain to parse complex sentences. Take this benign-looking sentence:
While
Anna dressed the baby played in the crib.
In
one study, 70% of younger adults interpreted this correctly: while Anna put on
clothes, the baby was playing. (This sentence is basically a PSA for comma
use.) However, only 50% of older adults did.
Because
eye movement and cognitive patterns change with age, older adults take longer
to scan and process text. When reading Chinese, which is visually complex,
older adults take almost twice as long as young adults.
PRACTICE THE BASICS
“Print
exposure” (how much someone reads) contributes to “crystallized intelligence”
(accumulated knowledge, reasoning, and vocabulary). Crystallized intelligence
helps people apply their reading skills. And print exposure plays an important
role in word-reading processes, for children and adults alike.
ACTIVATE THE SENSES
All
that highlighting you did in history class may have helped. Highlighting,
underlining, color-coding, note-taking, and other forms of active learning can
help to identify the most pertinent information and enhance reading
comprehension. But this is only up to a point. Excessive highlighting tends to
defeat the purpose, and actually limits comprehension.
In
a potential blow to diehard digital readers, reading comprehension is still
stronger in print than onscreen (although more research is needed on the exact
mechanisms for this). But visual aids can help readers of all ages in all
formats, such as seniors choosing prescription drug plans on a Medicare
website. Reading more comics and imagery-rich texts may also help to activate
more of your visual sense while reading.
THINK ABOUT READING
Annotation
is a tool for active reading, or reading with a specific purpose. Along with
the physical markings on a text, you can read actively by, for instance:
➧ summarizing
or rephrasing what you’ve just read
➧ explaining
it to others
➧ answering
questions about it (looking up book club questions might be a useful aid here)
➧ assessing
the difficulty of a passage
➧ making
predictions about what will happen next in a book
➧ thinking
about how your background knowledge is helping you understand a piece of text,
or where there are gaps in your prior knowledge
➧ relating
what you’re reading to your own experiences
➧ making
associations and comparisons
All these strategies are part of metacognition: essentially, thinking about thinking. READ MORE ➤➤
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