Mapping Unfamiliar Territory: Using Guided Reading Charts to Navigate Sources
The unfamiliar terrain of academic sources can be difficult for students to navigate effectively and efficiently. Their complex concepts and technical language make these sources inherently difficult, especially for undergraduates who are likely new to a subject area. Reading such texts demands that students use a variety of skills such as skimming, filtering out information that is less important, extracting major ideas, and evaluating information, to name just a few. Yet it is not only the difficult content that complicates academic reading; inexperienced students are likely unfamiliar with disciplinary conventions and modes of discourse and therefore may find that the unique structures and styles of academic sources add further complexity to the challenge of reading. Without an understanding of how a text is organized or what the author’s purpose is, it can be difficult for students to identify what matters and make meaning. Further, students’ inexperience with academic inquiry may mean that they are uncertain of their own information needs. Students, then, often struggle to develop a reading plan or even to recognize that the reading approaches to which they are accustomed are insufficient for this new landscape.
A guided reading chart is a tool students can use while reading to direct their attention to key elements. Sources are represented along one axis of the chart (e.g., rows). Depending on the context, a chart can include just one row to guide students’ reading of a single source or as many rows as are needed for work with multiple sources. The chart’s other axis (e.g., columns) then prompts students to notice and reflect on aspects of each source, framing what they need to extract from the sources. As students read sources, they record important elements or takeaways. The nature or detail of the students’ notes in the charts may vary.
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| Work Title | Mapping Unfamiliar Territory: Using Guided Reading Charts to Navigate Sources |
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| License | CC BY-SA 4.0 (Attribution-ShareAlike) |
| Work Type | Part Of Book |
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| Publication Date | 2023 |
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| Deposited | March 10, 2023 |
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