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Writing to Serve Your Readers Interest
Learning and Remembering Meaningful Information
(Refer to Cognitive Model diagram 1)
When readers are faced with new information we do not begin by reading in the sense of starting with the first word and move through the topic till the end. We first start with a prediction of what the topic will mean. Predictions can be understood as cognitive conception of questions we ask of the world around us, as we did as toddlers. Readers not only predict what an article may contain for what a particular statement may mean, we predict:
- What prior knowledge will be relevant and
- Which strategies of sensory experiences will be useful in approaching this new information.
These predictions are used, first in decoding the letters on the page and since the reader can be led by illustrations to expect the nature of the information or other context of cues. The predictions may also even precede reading the article. This activity is usually unconscious and is in part how we orient ourselves in the world. If we've established beliefs about ourselves and our place in the world, that belief also influences whether we read that article.
Since we predict the content of an article, we also use these cues to be in an active or strategic reader.
- The active reader uses these cues to interpret what they read and if to pursue further reading.
- The strategic reader uses the same cues to choose to read and how deeply to read that article.
For example, a sports fan will refer to a sports section in a newspaper. These cues will cause one reader to relax, get his coffee and settle in for a leisurely review of his favorite news. This usually begins by remembering what they already know. That the playoffs were held last night, and knowing this, generates questions like, who won a playoff? This focuses attention on knowledge, and reading strategies on what to read, what to skip and what to add to new information to form a conceptualized knowledge to our network of words that evokes cross references. Researchers call this activating our relevant schema.
Another reader may see the sports heading and other sub-headers and take the cue to skip reading the entire section.
Comprehension takes place as a reader connects new information with prior information. No matter how well written an article is, information alone does not allow comprehension. Comprehension has to depend upon the reader’s prior knowledge and his reading strategies.
A fan of sports, hunting, Internet marketing, or a music fan usually has a large body of organized information and can fit new information into his sensory memory.
As readers, we have different bodies of organized knowledge and actually seek out articles of our interest. Someone lacking prior knowledge of a particular subject is incomprehensible to that subject.
Even though articles, report or reviews may be well written with information, information becomes comprehensible only to readers who can combined this new information with their organized existing knowledge network on a particular subject. Comprehension of new information requires a meshing of the new with the known. This meshing network is one of the fundamental concepts of the cognitive learning theory.
Comprehension is not possible unless the reader can predict, to ask relevant questions, and to know how to find the answers.
Learning and Teaching
The knowledge of subject matter is essential for the development of effective content, and fundamental interpersonal skills are equally essential to the delivery of this content to the writer’s students.
So comprehension does not necessarily lead to learning from information in a meaningful, useful way. People do not ordinarily remember a lot of the exact information they read, instead they learn a form of meaning from this information. We select. We use selected portions of this new information to address the issues important to us. For all practical purposes, the bulk of information we’ve read is simply forgotten. We use it to service our model of the world, and then discard all the other details.
Cognitive theorists say that once we comprehend new information, then this new information has to be learned through activities which enrich the connections between the new and the prior knowledge. Without activities this knowledge is only conceptualized knowledge. It’s only a network of words.
Comprehended information is converted into learned information through activities. Students convert through activities, such as taking notes, summarizing, outlining, making analogies, relating to the information to ourselves personally, and creating mental imagery and activities known as elaboration.
- Learning takes place when new information becomes a part of the existing knowledge network.
- Elaboration is any method of think linking the new ideas and prior knowledge together so as to become more deeply connected.
- New knowledge becomes meaningful and useful when elaborated and richly integrated.
- The new knowledge needs to fit into the existing knowledge network, or it can modify that network (changes one’s thinking from conceptualized knowledge to sensory experiences from activity).
Knowledge can only be meaningful only after it is interconnected with related knowledge and useful only if we can access it to perform an activity.
Meaningful knowledge is filed and cross referenced with conceptualized knowledge to which it is connected.
Knowledge that is useful is so only if you can cross-reference it when you need it.
Excerpts from Writing to Serve the Readers Interest,
by Wallace D. Johnson