Teaching Strategies: Reading for Information

People read for different reasons. You may read just to enjoy a book or story or you may read a letter or a flyer. The most important thing for a student to learn is how to read to find information or an answer to a question. Reading to find certain information is different than reading for pleasure. You are reading for a purpose or objective. That objective is to find the information you are looking for or taking information out of the book to relay to other information. You have to know what you are looking for and have to be able to know what source you need to find the information.

The student needs to read with the question in mind. If the student can pick the keywords from the question such as a date or a location, the student will be able to use these as clues as they read their books. You can make it like a game. A reward system can be put in place for finding the question. A simple reading exercise to teach students this valuable skill is to have them find just a word in their assigned reading. If they find a small reward can given.

To enhance this skill the student can be upgraded to finding sentences. It's that simple. Give the student a sentence in the required text and have them highlight it. After a few times, the student will be able to find whole sentences and paragraphs. Now it is time to backtrack. Give the student a question and highlight the keywords in the question. See how he or she does. If the student is proficient, they will be able to find the answer with the keywords. If the student is having trouble, highlight all the keywords in the text for them to try to find.

When students reach the higher grades, finding information in text is not only an important skill, but it is an essential skill from high school on. If this skill is mastered the older student may want to try to learn speed reading or skimming methods. With the amount of reading in higher education it is almost an impossible task to get it done. Some students resort to cliff notes and this may get them by, but there will come a time when cliff notes will not be enough and their grades will suffer. Reading for information is pertinent to their academic success.