Better pay attention, reader.
This whole story may be a blur.
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated the ill effects of mindless
reading, a phenomenon in which people take in sentence after sentence without
really paying attention.
Ever read the same paragraph three times? Or get to the end of a page and
realize you don't know what you just read?
That's mindless reading. It is the literary equivalent of driving for miles
without remembering how you got there, something so common many people don't
even notice it.
In a new study of college students, researchers from the University of
Pittsburgh and the University of British Columbia established a way to study
mindless reading in a lab.
Their findings showed that daydreaming has its costs.
The readers who zoned out most tended to do the worst on tests of reading
comprehension, a significant, if not surprising, result. The study also
suggested that zoning out caused the poor test results, as opposed to other
possible factors, such as the complexity of the text or the task.
The researchers hope their work inspires more research into why zoning out
happens, and what can be done to stop it.
For now, they want the problem to be taken seriously.
"When you talk about this work at conferences, it does lend itself to a lot
of jokes," acknowledges University of Pittsburgh professor Erik Reichle,
co-leader of the study.
"It's so ubiquitous. Everybody does it," he said. "I think that's one of the
main reasons it's been overlooked. And there's been a view that it is tough to
study experimentally. Hopefully, now, there will be more interest in the topic."
The federal government is showing some.
Reichle and fellow psychology professor Jonathan Schooler did the study on a
$691,000 grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, an arm of the Education
Department. It is one of 178 federally backed projects aimed at giving schools a
scientific basis for sound policies.
Over three experiments, students used computers to read the first five
chapters of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace." (Reichle wanted some boring reading,
better for zoning out.)
Reichle said the dry text itself did not skew the results toward mindless
wandering. After all, the students were on alert, unlike the typical reader.
Participants were told to monitor and report instances of zoning out as they
read text on a computer. Half of them got computer reminders, too: "Were you
zoning out?"
Despite all that, many still reported zoning out at a regular pace.
"That's the amazing thing," Reichle said. "It shows how often this can happen
even under conditions that are designed to keep it from happening."
The students said as their eyes scanned the words, their minds often were
elsewhere.
They were hungry, or thirsty, or tired. They were thinking about plans,
worries or memories. Some drifted into fantasies. Others stuck with the book,
but their minds wandered into tangents about the plot.
Karen Wixson, a nationally recognized reading expert and professor of
education at the University of Michigan, cautioned not to read too much into all
this.
"This is a long ways away from having implications for reading instruction,"
Wixson said. "It could, eventually, down the line. But to draw inferences about
this as a contributing factor toward reading comprehension would be a huge, huge
leap."
To apply to younger kids, the target audience of reading classes, the
findings would have to be replicated among school-age children, Wixson said.
She said participants may have zoned more often because they were reading off
computer screens, and because they had no real incentive to pay attention, as
they would in school.
But at the International Reading Association, Cathy Roller sees some direct
payoff. She directs research and policy for the association, which represents
literacy professionals.
By recognizing zoning out as problem, she said, teachers can do something.
Like asking students to put a checkmark next to paragraphs as they finish
them and then summarize what they just read.
Or having students scan all the pictures and bold type before reading the
text of a story, so that they have a general understanding of what's to come.
Zoning out may simply mean that the prose isn't interesting, Roller said. But
it could also be a clear signal that students don't understand the work.
"You don't want to generalize narrow studies into large implications," Roller
said. "But zoning out is probably not a whole lot different than not
comprehending. And telling people to start using some good comprehension
strategies is not likely to do any harm."
Roller knows. She had just been zoning out while reading a literature review.
By the way, last sentence here. If you missed anything, there's no shame in
rereading.
