Hi! In the last blog we talked about getting the most out of your postgraduate readings. We discussed the early steps of reading. This involved highlighting points in your module text and making marginal notes to guide you through a re-reading for assignment and exams.
At this time, you need to get involved in post-reading activities. These post-reading strategies should include: (a) thinking about the subject as a whole and (b) making notes notes on your readings. Let's look at the first point, thinking about the subject as a whole.
Followers of this blog will know that I believe that you need to take time to think. Reading is not an exception to this rule. When you think about your module text as a whole, you should start to to form the building blocks of what is known as a
hierarchy of critical thinking. This hierarchy works something like this in terms of information in your readings.
First: you gather
1. Knowledge. You gather the details that make up the bits of information in a particular module text, for example a module text/booklet on "Management, People and Organizations".
Next, you begin to build:
2.Comprehension. You build an understanding of the pieces of knowledge in your module text on "Management, People and Organizations." You start to see how these pieces of information relate to one another.
Now, you can use your understanding to create:
3. Application. You can use the information in your module text to create a new understanding of real-life examples. In fact, these examples can be drawn from your own practical experience, can be gleaned from reading journal articles on other organizations, can be seen in case studies or can be simulated from a combination of all three.
At this step, you need show that you can analyse or explain these relationships:
4. Analysis. After you see how the information applies to real-life situations, you must be able to explain or analyse how the information from the text explains what we see happening in real-life, journal articles or case studies. It is not enough to merely apply an idea, an explanation is a required step in forming understanding from either a module text.
It is not enough to read a text in isolation from other ideas from the same subject. In your course module in "Management, People and Organizations", you see the inter-related nature of other subjects in the both the Social Sciences and Business Theory. So, at this step you fit together concepts:
5. Synthesis. As you fit together ideas, they form a new understanding of the course module. This allows you to see the ideas within the module in a larger context, a context which relates to the Social Sciences as a whole and strengthens your idea of the place of any theory in this context.
At the end of a reading, you should be able to form:
6. An Evaluation. When you form an evaluation of the ideas you have learned in your module text in "Management, People and Organizations", you can see the strengthens and weaknesses of different theories, how they interplay with other ideas, their relevance to the subject as a whole, their importance to the field and their continuing place in studying this subject.
This critical method of approaching reading forces the reader to make links. Links between:
1. Basic knowledge and concepts. (Comprehension)
2. Concepts or theory and real life situations or simulations. (Application)
3. Applications and explanations of how theories explain real-life situations or simulations. (Analysis)
4. New ideas and older ideas. (Synthesis)
5. How synthesis leads us to evaluate the new information (Evaluation)
This hierarchy of knowledge that I have used to explain thinking within the reading process is also known as "Bloom's Taxonomy". The important thing the reader must understand is how they will use all of these steps in thinking about their module texts. Once you understand your module texts in this way it will be easier to apply the same hierarchy of knowledge to any other learning process such as a course assignment, an exam or even your dissertation.
You can also write notes about your course materials. I would suggest the Cornell note-taking approach. For now, I'm going to refer you to "The Learning Box", an online resource, to describe this approach to note-taking here. I plan to do a blog on writing course notes in the next few months, but the graphic representation of how to write notes at Toolbox will help you for now:
http://coe.jmu.edu/learningtoolbox/cornellnotes.html
Remember that reading is an active process, a process that forces you to make connections within your subject and with other previous knowledge. Testing has shown that students recall information better if they can relate it to previous learning and don't see their subject/course material in isolation to other learned materials. Reading, as I have shown it, is hard work. It takes time and should not be postponed for a brief review before an exam or an assignment. This is particularly true of long and complex texts. If you have taken the time to organize and understand the course module materials ahead of time, you will have fewer nasty surprises later on in the programme. This is the challenge of your graduate programme. Good reading.
KB
