LD Resources

© 2003 Richard Wanderman

Most of us now take for granted the almost ubiquitous Hi-Liter pen and have been using them for years in a variety of contexts but consider this: if you don’t read well the Hi-Liter pen can be worse than useless. How many of you have seen students highlight a whole page of text, or at least, too much to be of use? Or, how many times have you yourself highlighted something only to realize later that it was not quite what you wanted to highlight? Students do this often.

Why highlight text? Because the human memory isn’t very good. If we had photographic memories we’d just search through the pages in our heads and come up with what we wanted. But we don’t and we need to reduce the amount to review and the method for seeing that reduced amount.

A typical highlighting job is to pick out the important ideas on a page so that later, in reviewing, one will be able to scan more easily and see them.

This can be problematic if you don’t read well though because in order to pick out the important points you have to hold enough points together in your head to compare them. If your decoding is too slow to get decent comprehension or you are distractible enough so that your brain is resetting before you get enough points to compare this is a hard task and can lead to the infamous yellow page (highlighting too much).

Here are two issues to consider:

1. Underlying reading problems make it hard to do this task in the “traditional” way.

2. Hi-Liters are permanent and learning by doing and then correcting mistakes is problematic.

Reading Problems
In no way am I advocating not learning how to read but sometimes it helps to think outside the box.

Ideally when we read we want both the overall context and all the underlying detail that supports it. Because getting the overall is heavily dependent on reading with decent comprehension, might it be possible to get some of the underlying detail without that? In other words, could one scan a text looking for detail and pick it out, even as a weak reader? And, might that be a useful technique to use short of getting the big picture? Well, yes.

Here’s an idea:

1. Get four different colored Hi-Liter pens.

2. Scan a text looking for people’s names and highlight each of them in yellow.

3. Re-scan looking for place-names and highlight each of them in red.

4. Re-scan looking for numerical information of any kind (dates, or any numbers) and highlight each in green.

5. Finally, Re-scan looking for words you don’t know but think you ought to know to support the reading and highlight each in blue. If the book has a glossary and those words are in it highlight them there too.

This categorization through color is not going to give you the big picture or even a context for what these now decontextualized pieces mean, but it will familiarize you with the details that make up the whole.

Dr. Lynne Anderson-Inman at The Center for Electronic Studying at The University of Oregon calls this method “multi-phasic reading.”

I would guess and Lynne’s research backs this up, that if a student used this method, then walked away from the material and took a test, she might do better than had she tried to get the whole and failed through lack of reading comprehension.

My unscientific guess is this: isolating a word or phrase (selectively scanning), touching that text with the Hi-Liter, and possibly saying the highlighted text aloud is the same kind of multi-sensory memory hit that makes the reading instruction methods that most reading this use work.

Correcting Mistakes and Learning by Doing
The other big problem with Hi-Liters is that they are permanent. There are two problems with this:

1. You can’t use Hi-Liters to highlight books or materials that you do not own (and even if you own the textbook, re-selling it to the bookstore when you’ve highlighted entire pages may be difficult).

2. The consequences of making a mistake while highlighting are a negative influence on doing more highlighting to learn how to highlight from experience.

I call the underlying issue in #2 “mistake intolerance” and I find it fascinating to look at all tools and learning experiences with this distinction in mind.

My first experience with this distinction was in an introductory studio art class in college. I had no clue at the time about the meta-issue here, just the nitty gritty of what was in front of me.

We were given two media to explore for a term: a large piece of granite and a large mound of water-based clay, kept under plastic to keep wet and pliable.

We were advised to start on the stone as it would take longer and was harder to work with.

Donned goggles, picked up hammer and chisel and started chipping away. Oh, we all did some drawings first of what it was we were trying to carve.

Two weeks later, almost all of us ended up with a marble-sized piece of stone.

What had we learned? Stone is a mistake-intolerant medium: you can chip away at it but there’s no going back.

Sculpting clay was a very different experience: I could take some away and put some back and as long as I kept it wet I could do this for quite some time (not forever but long enough to get things worked out).

Clay turned out to be a much more mistake-tolerant medium.

I have an MFA in ceramics, and now you know why.

Now, take this distinction and map it onto other things:

Ink and paper: mistake intolerant
Writing with a computer: mistake tolerant

Film camera: mistake intolerant
Digital camera: mistake tolerant

Piano: mistake intolerant
Electronic keyboard: mistake tolerant

Hi-Liter Pen: mistake intolerant
Hi-Liter tape: mistake tolerant
Erasable highlighter: mistake tolerant
Acetate sheet protector and dry erase marker: mistake tolerant