Event Title
Utilizing Interdisciplinary Insights to Build Efficient and Effective Reading Skills
Location
DSB 104A
Start Date
29-5-2015 3:40 PM
End Date
29-5-2015 5:00 PM
Session Type
Poster Presentation
Description
In team-teaching classes of first-year undergraduate Honors students, we have found that even well-motivated students complain of “too much reading.” We can make it easier for students to read extensively and critically, particularly via interdisciplinary pedagogy. Many of our students’ “ah-ha” moments combined historical with economic perspectives showing the creativity that results from reading economic monographs, historical texts, and an historical novel in the same course. We found outlines, discussion questions, study guides, and glossaries useful, but we also selected our course readings to ensure significant topical overlap. The diagrammatic methods of Economics helped students comprehend more loosely-connected historical narratives. We used matrices and other visual methods to accustom students to different patterns of prose, giving them practice in what Nancy Spivey calls the “reorganizing” of unfamiliar texts to conform to the students’ schemata.
Topic Designation
Teaching & Learning
Utilizing Interdisciplinary Insights to Build Efficient and Effective Reading Skills
DSB 104A
In team-teaching classes of first-year undergraduate Honors students, we have found that even well-motivated students complain of “too much reading.” We can make it easier for students to read extensively and critically, particularly via interdisciplinary pedagogy. Many of our students’ “ah-ha” moments combined historical with economic perspectives showing the creativity that results from reading economic monographs, historical texts, and an historical novel in the same course. We found outlines, discussion questions, study guides, and glossaries useful, but we also selected our course readings to ensure significant topical overlap. The diagrammatic methods of Economics helped students comprehend more loosely-connected historical narratives. We used matrices and other visual methods to accustom students to different patterns of prose, giving them practice in what Nancy Spivey calls the “reorganizing” of unfamiliar texts to conform to the students’ schemata.