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Speed-reading can undermine learning
Reading in overdrive works for experts, not learners.
By Bridget Murray
Monitor staff
Nearly every student who faces a week of heavy reading has heard the same advice from a professor: Don’t read every word. Scan it. Read quickly. Ignore unimportant words. Focus on key concepts.
As a result, students often consider skimming a crucial study skill. Some try teaching themselves to fly through their reading. Others take speed-reading lessons or sign up for one of the abundant commercial speed-reading courses offered on the World Wide Web. Among these is the famous Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics course, which claims to more than triple people’s reading speed while simultaneously boosting their comprehension.
But can you really increase your reading speed from 300 words per minute (wpm)—the average for college students—to 1,000 wpm or more, and still understand the material as well? Certainly speed-reading gets you through more information, research suggests, but you’ll likely absorb considerably less of it.
The strategy taught in speed-reading courses works best for people who are already familiar with the topics they’re reading about, not for students trying to learn new information, says pre-eminent reading-speed researcher Ronald Carver, PhD, an educational psychologist at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. The method helps when reviewing or checking for new information. But it’s no way to absorb unfamiliar material, or to appreciate poetry or literature, Carver says.
Carver opposes the practice of telling undergraduates students to skim their reading because he says they skip words and miss important facts. Professors should rather advise students to read carefully, not fast, he says. Reading practice is the best way to increase one’s reading speed and comprehension, Carver adds. He recommends assigning students background reading to help them tackle longer, more difficult texts.
Problems with speed-reading
Most speed-reading courses teach people to focus on ideas expressed in “chunks of words,” instead of reading each word, and they instruct people to run their eyes straight down the page instead of from left to right. By boosting the amount of text people cover, these shortcuts help readers absorb more information, they claim.
However, many researchers question whether such approaches can really help readers absorb more information. On the contrary, teaching readers to speed up will likely backfire, claims Carver.
Some people are misled by evidence suggesting that children who read faster also comprehend more, Carver says. However, that evidence is merely correlational, says Timothy Slocum, PhD, a special education researcher at Utah State University.
According to a research review he recently conducted, those correlations appeared in students who read every word and had reading speeds of between 20 and 250 wpm. One shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that increasing one’s reading speed by skimming will boost one’s comprehension, Slocum says.
In fact, Carver uses the words skimming and speed reading interchangeably in his book “Reading Rate: A Review of Research and Theory” (Academic Press, 1990) because he says they both involve skipping words. And if you skip words, you understand less, he argues.
In a study in the mid 1980s, for example, Carver compared trained speed readers with naturally fluent readers and found that both groups’ comprehension deteriorated when they read at rates higher than 600 words a minute.
Also, the naturally fast readers were better than speed-readers at remembering a lengthy book’s important details.
Backing Carver’s findings is a study by psychologists Marcel Just, PhD, and Patricia Carpenter, PhD, outlined in their book “The Psychology of Reading and Language Comprehension,” (Allyn and Bacon, 1987). They compared the reading comprehension of 11 graduates of a speed-reading program with that of 25 college students, some of whom skimmed the material. Students read a difficult article on Mars geology and an easy article about John Colter, a 19th-century U.S. explorer. Both the skimmers and speed readers missed important details in both texts. Skipped words became unknown facts, Just says.
Reading in overdrive
Reading is a lot like driving, Carver says. People’s usual reading speed of between 200 and 300 wpm is like a comfortable gear that works for most textual terrain. When the reading gets difficult, they shift gears to a lower reading speed that helps them understand more.
By comparison, skimming and speed-reading are overdrive gears that whisk knowledgeable readers to new information, he says.
“Speed-reading doesn’t help you read more words, but it does help you to more actively apply what you already know,” he says. For example, a geologist reading about rocks on Mars can skip the part about how they compare with Earth’s rocks: She uses her own geological knowledge to make comparisons.
Most speed readers are better than untrained skimmers at making use of prior knowledge and targeting the key points an author means to convey, Just contends. However, having that prior knowledge is crucial, suggests a recent study by psychologist Walter Kintsch, PhD, and his colleagues at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado.
In the experiment, published last year in the journal Cognition and Instruction (Vol. 14, No. 1, p. 1–43), 96 schoolchildren ages 10 to 15 read either highly detailed or cursory articles about heart disease and mammals’ traits.
Children who had background on the topics learned more from the cursory text, but those without any background learned more from the more detailed text. Those with the prior knowledge used inference and guesswork to construct new knowledge, says Kintsch.
Most students needed a thorough explanation, though, and speed-reading would not have helped them, Kintsch says.
“Sure, speed-reading helps you find the key concepts—the raisins in the cake,” says Kintsch. “But if you really want to understand the material, it’s not a wise strategy.”
When promoting true learning, professors should tout reading-depth rather than reading-speed, Kintsch asserts.
“Unless there’s something specific you want students to look for, telling them to skim material is really bad advice,” says Kintsch.
“If you actually want to understand something, there’s no shortcut but hard work.”
