Although the term pseudoreading is unfamiliar to many (including myself when I first read the texts), I am sure that many of us have unfortunately engaged in this action before. An example of pseudoreading is skimming through a passage to find the answers to questions listed on a worksheet. I would argue that the reading section of standardized tests such as the ACT even required pseudoreading to answer the questions. When taking timed, standardized tests like these, most of us only care about answering the questions correctly and quickly. I remember personally taking an ACT prep class that specifically recommended students to look at the questions first, and go through the reading to find the answers. Sure, this strategy might have resulted in good grades for many of us, but did we really comprehend the reading? At the time, perhaps -- many of the questions on the reading asked about main ideas or literary techniques the author used. However, this temporary comprehension rarely translates to learning or comprehension in the long run, which is exemplified through how most of us completely forget about the passage after we walk out of the test room. My example of pseudoreading is intended to to say this: reading does not equate comprehension. In order to truly comprehend a text or group of texts, we need to be able to interrogate the author, connect the information to our prior knowledge, synthesize information across multiple sources, and explain why the text is significant, which are all especially relevant skills in reading historical texts (Buehl, 2013, p.34). This is relevant to us because, as teachers, we need to challenge students to adapt this method of reading and critiquing texts so that they can truly understand the meaning of the text and its overall significance, rather than pseudoreading to merely satisfy the written assignment that may accompany the text.
An unfortunate trend in the history discipline as it relates to high school curriculum is using the assigned textbook as a Bible; in other words, using the history textbook as the focal point of the a course. As Lee and Spratley note, textbooks are often difficult for adolescents to understand for multiple reasons. One of these reasons include their tendency to omit relational words among sentences and paragraphs, which can make the logical relationship between ideas difficult to grasp without background knowledge to make these connections (p. 6). This also can make the information seem like an endless stream of facts -- Buehl, Lee, and Spratley argue this renders reading as an act of "fact collecting," or determining the who's, what's, and where's of the reading. This is both boring an ineffective. Personally, I remember one of my high school history classes being like this; the teacher almost exclusively taught from the textbook. Although I passed the class, it was difficult for me to stay motivated to do the work, and I honestly did not learn much and forgot a lot of the information from that class when I left high school, especially since I pseudoread.
How can we avoid our students pseudoreading and barely scratching on the surface of texts as teachers? In terms of history specifically, this means shifting from the who's, what's, and where's to the how's and why's. Although the who's, what's, and where's are important, they shouldn't be the focal point but, rather, the foundation of understanding a text. The real meat of a text lies in the how's and why's -- its significance and impact. History is not just about fact-collecting; this version of history views history as truth statements, whereas historians read historical texts as arguments (Buehl, 2013, p. 61-62).
This is a funny video that I'm sure many of you are familiar with. Although this video is engaging through humor and provides an overview of history, it rarely answers the question "why" these events occur and presents the information as a sequence of facts. Imagine history textbooks to be this video, but without the humor and being much more dry. This is why it is difficult to engage and teach students solely by the textbook.
Once students are able to comprehend texts in history, they also become able to critique them. As we know, many historical texts come with their biases, which can be problematic when they are taken as fully factual. A personal anecdote than I can share in relation to this concerns the Spanish Conquest. The mainstream perspective regarding this event involves painting Hernan Cortes and his small army as a group of soldiers who, under their fortitude and power, were able to defeat the Aztec Empire, who vastly outnumbered them. In last year's Mexican history class that I took with Professor Baber, we learned that the true story behind this is that Cortes and his army were actually assisted by other indigenous groups -- namely, the Tlaxcalans, who were enemies of the Aztec Empire. Additionally, a substantial percentage of the Aztecs perished due to diseases brought by European colonizers. When you take this into account, it shows how the mainstream perspective regarding the Spanish Conquest is inaccurate and problematic. In a more broad sense, it shows how taking everything at face value and not critiquing a text or collection of texts can misconstrue history by accepting inaccurate "facts" as the truth. I believe that it is part my job as a future history teacher to teach these literacy skills to my students, such that they are able to analyze historical texts critically and understand the significance, context, or even validity of the text; in other words, become critical consumers of information, which can extend to other disciplines and in their lives as a whole.
Upon reading Buehl's and Lee and Spratley's work, I would say that their view on the discipline of history and how it is employed in high school is accurate and something that I have personally witnessed. Though I personally concluded my objectives in the previous paragraph, a question that comes up is: how do you employ these practices in the face of a school curriculum that may enforce a large focus on students reading the textbook? I am inclined to say to expose students to other sources (primary sources of course, as it is history class, but maybe other forms of texts such as newspapers, journals, videos, etc.), but how would a teacher engage students if they require additional work to be done by students by reading these other texts?
These tweets relate to President Trump's denial of the death toll in Puerto Rico. As the latter link shows, NBC News reports that Trump provides no evidence to discount the study and, without evidence, claims that the death toll is to make him look bad. It's important to be a critical consumer of what you read, but if you have no evidence to discount the text, then your claims might not be as...convincing.
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ReplyDeleteHey, Wilfredo Reina. I totally agree with your opinion about that as educators , we should not only teach students how to do the reading comprehensions but should also need to challenge students to adapt to the methods of reading and critiquing texts so that they can truly understand the meaning of the reading, rather than pseudoreading to merely satisfy the reading assignment that may accompany the texts. English as a second language in most parts of China, many English teachers only teach the students the skills to do the reading comprehensions in order to help the students get higher grades. They read the questions first and find the key words in the reading to finish texts. However, after reading, they even do not know what the passages are talking about. They learn the skills of doing reading comprehension texts not understanding the readings. By doing this students usually get good grades but have lower ability in reading after they graduated from school. When they read they read very slow or even can not make a full understanding a passage. I think this is what should be changed in the future teaching. Educators should not only concentrated on the grades but the ability of reading after they graduated from school. I think that is what they really need.
ReplyDeleteHi Xuezhi,
DeleteI completely agree with you. Teaching students to read just so they can answer questions is very problematic because they are unlikely to retain the information in the long-term. This really isn't learning. Like with your example of how English is often taught in China, students are taught to approach texts by pseudoreading for information to answer questions and obtain high grades, which does not correlate with comprehending the texts. We really need to be mindful of this as teachers, as it is our job to, at the very least, prepare our students for college.
You said "reading does not equate comprehension" and I think that was a very powerful statement. As I was reading your post, I was reflecting back on my own experiences and I can clearly remember classes where I psuedoread. I even did this last semester in a Ged Ed class I just wanted to pass. Like you said, this is something I think we're all guilty of. We then should take our own experiences, learn from them, and really try to avoid this in our own classrooms. We could do this by making it more relatable to the students, similar to the discussion we had last week.
ReplyDeleteI really like that you gave that example of the ACT. I remember when I was preparing for it, I had a teacher tell me to just read the questions first and then skim through the readings to find the answers. Personally, I didn't follow those directions but I remember feeling discouraged when my teacher told us that. They were giving us tips on how to get the answers correct, they didn't care if we fully understood what was happening. This ties back to the emphasis and significance that is put on standardized testing. They don't care if we understand, they just care that we get good enough scores.
Hey Belinda,
DeleteI agree with everything you have said. I like when you said this in relation to the issue of pseudoreading texts: "We then should take our own experiences, learn from them, and really try to avoid this in our classrooms. We could do this by making it more relatable to the students...", because learning from mistakes is very important for progress. We witnessed the problems of being taught to pass rather than being taught to learn firsthand, and we can use this experience to avoid making this mistake when we become teachers in the future. We would really be doing our future students an injustice by doing otherwise. You also pose a solution in saying that we may address this problem by making the content more relatable to students. This is so important. How can we expect students to learn if they are not motivated to learn? How can we expect adolescent students to be motivated if the content doesn't relate to them? I remember taking Manual Drafting freshman year and not doing well in the class because the practice seemed so outdated and irrelevant to me. I got a C in that class, which was the only C I've ever got. Funnily enough, I passed computer drafting with an A because it seemed more intuitive and useful to me in this age. I think this really just speaks to the importance of relating course content to your students so that students will be motivated to learn.
I think your point about critically engaging with the text and critiquing it is an important part of reading that often goes ignored in high school history classrooms. I, like most of us, engaged in pseudo-reading in order to meet the standard set by teachers: simply answering the questions. This, however, did not allow for me to gain a broader knowledge of what I was learning or to try to address certain inaccuracies, especially those in history classes. When students only engage in pseudo-reading, this kind of engagement can not take place. This is unfortunate as historical reading should often be looked at for biases or other inaccuracies. As teachers, I think it is our responsibility to ensure that these kinds of readings (the more in-depth, engaged readings) take place.
ReplyDeleteI thought the term pseudoreading was interesting because I could relate also. Some of the classes I have taken I realize that I have been skimming through them because I tend to read only what I need to pass the class and have a small discussion in class. It is a hard habit to get out of once in it and it seems necessary for teachers to make sure that they engage texts and set an example for their students and this could help the students to see a good role model. I may not be going into history but I do agree with you that those texts should really be critically engaged and not taken as facts because there are many biases that affect what the reader takes out of the text
ReplyDeleteI greatly enjoyed reading your post. Although history is not my subject area, I find it very interesting. I have heard a number of people say that history is becoming a dying subject, but honestly, I think history is essential because the quote "History repeats itself" is one that is very common in today's world. By teaching history, we see how, and most importantly WHY our world is the way it is today.
ReplyDeleteNow, to answer your question, I agree with your answer, and that is really the one only one I can come up with. I do not think it would be asking for too much from the students because I am sure it is possible to find some online text that can teach students these practices in a reasonable workload. Going back to when you said "interrogate the author, connect the information to our prior knowledge, synthesize information across multiple sources, and explain why the text is significant," I think this can be summed up by saying that it is important to engage with a reading which in turn may improve the understanding of the reading. This is seen in the "Reading in Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy, where students do not become independent learners, which then shows when a student has to acquire math outside the school setting when needed (Lee and Spartley 12).
I really appreciate your thoughts about how reading does not equal comprehension! I want to shout that from the rooftops! So often, I feel like the automatic response is to assign readings and the assumption is that the students comprehend it. I cannot tell you how many times in high school and college I have been assigned a reading and never dealt with that reading in class, at least in a critical way. If students are never asked to synthesize or critically think about what they are reading, they probably won't ever truly understand the content. In response to your question, what do we do when we work in schools where the focus is TEXT BOOK TEXT BOOK TEXT BOOK. I believe, we must be intentional about including primary sources and outside secondary sources (other than the textbook) in our classrooms, as in class activities and homework. I also think that when you have to use textbooks, or any other sources, you have to incorporate activities that make it fun and memorable. Instead of simply reading a source, how can we incorporate literacy activities? How can we do group work and full class activities that engage students? A lot of comprehension, which Buehl and others mention, has to do with what we talked about last week, engagement. I appreciate you sharing the history of the entire world with us, that video is hilarious, but it does neglect to mention the "why" which is the meat of history, it is the most important part! Building constructions and understanding why something happens and why it causes something else is essential to our understanding and comprehension.
ReplyDeleteI am not a history teacher, but I think your question on what to do if your school places high importance on a certain textbook is pertinent to so many subjects. From a few good high school history classes that I remember, they focused on what you suggested: primary sources. And those teachers never had tests involving memorizing the "facts" you learned from the text book. Instead, we wrote papers (the main cause of the American Revolution, for instance) and if we chose an argument similar to one made in a textbook we would have to support that by quoting and analyzing a certain number of relevant primary sources. The teacher took time in class to read different types of primary sources with us so we could comprehend the author's purpose and message, which I thought made time period we covered much more interesting.
ReplyDeleteWilfredo,
ReplyDeleteMy experience in History class was the same as yours. I guess it never faced me, or I never saw the importance of it because my home was the place where we had in-depth discussions about many topics. It was at home that my ability to think and analyze texts (in all forms) was developed. However, many of our students do not have this at home. They rely on the school to learn skills that can help them become successful. As I mentioned to Kyle, I believe that we, as educators, should be able to help students learn these skills.
I appreciate your attention to finding sources outside of the textbook. While some of my teachers did find sources like news articles and excerpts from professionally written texts, it wasn't until my college history professor introduced the idea that all texts can be engaged with. I remember having a required reading of All Quiet on The Western Front when learning about WWI and asking, how can a fictional text give us factual information about history? It was exactly as you said; it is all about the bias presented in the text. While the narrative does not explain every factual detail or was exactly true it did give many other peoples truths. In that class we engaged in all kinds of texts and again I totally agree that the value of learning about peoples biases in writing is extremely important, not just in the arts. It is common in math classes for pseudo-reading to occur, (What information do we actually need to solve this problem?) But, seeing a bias and engaging in multiple sources is just as important to understand in math as well. We could even use your tweet examples. Can we trust the numbers that are in the tweets? Where are the sources? What does it mean to lose 3000 lives in Peurto Rico as opposed to 18? How much is billions of dollars? How much money is actually needed to "re-build"? All of these questions go cross cirriculum and could most certainly be used in a math class as well. -Kiley
ReplyDeleteI personally liked Buehls not just because of the lack of textbook structure but the format in the writing looked more philosophical in the context of comprehending for reading. I feel its important to dig into your question about psuereading and trying to go above and beyond it. My question is how do we balance their expectation in the classroom but have their curiosity into the class or even outside? I say this because your story and perspective is valid that there needs to be a value and proper informational representation to history or themes of culture that are connected even if there a large time difference or short time span of information.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your interpretation of how pseudoreading is displayed in the classroom, especially with history students. I believe this act of just skimming through texts to catch the answers could be minimized if teachers swayed from asking direct-answer questions such as "where was the first women's rights convention held" but instead allow for more open ended questions.These types of questions will aid for a deepened understanding of the text. I also agree with your argument stating that once students are able to understand texts, they are able to critique them, and nowadays that is crucial. Students need to have a critical lens when reading articles and be able to analyze to validity.
ReplyDeleteI think what you are talking about goes deeper than the direct-answered question and teachers should be analyzing their own goals of the classroom. Is the goal for students to know where the first women's rights convention was held, or is it what happened at the convention. It goes back to the curriculum and goal of the teacher. -Kiley
DeleteWhen I learnt English history of my first year in college,my teacher always played videos about history for us.In the beginning,we are very confused about why the teacher don't teach us about textbooks.Most of us thought that the teacher was irresponsible for us. But after we watched a lot of videos,we started to understand why.These videos are the textbooks but in funny way.So about your question ,I want to suggest that teachers should engage themselves into the reading before teaching students so that teachers can find resources about the reading or tell students how they feel about the readings.I think this can help students to understand easier than only read by themselves.
ReplyDelete