What is the Nature of Development? 

Education is undergoing significant transformation. Today’s learning environment necessitates the exploration of innovative solutions, chiefly due to the distinct attitudes and learning approaches of modern students. In broad strokes, today’s youth have an urgent need for abundance and immediacy in all facets. They thirst for knowledge, skills, and, most importantly, affirmation of their uniqueness. Students can access information with unprecedented speed. With the aid of countless videos, they are able to quickly acquire specific skills. By turning to social media, they easily seek validation for their choices. Nonetheless, this dynamic is hardly synonymous with authentic learning, which, at its core, simply demands time.

Navigating an Accelerated World

The world has been undeniably accelerating for some time, a shift largely attributable to the emergence of ‘digital natives.’ These individuals, born into an era of widespread internet use, interact with electronic devices and gadgets with an almost instinctive ease. The concept of ‘digital natives’ was first introduced by Marc Prensky, an American media scholar, writer, and designer of educational systems and computer games, in an article for “On the Horizon.” Prensky and his colleagues found that while youths using tablets or smartphones do read more quickly, they retain less information and fundamentally face more significant learning challenges. Further research has identified several defining characteristics of this generation, including:

• The ability to visualize and comprehend virtual surfaces through a window of a screen,
• Difficulty understanding long and complex texts,
• Competence in reading from small screens,
• A preference for visual and auditory content over text,
• A favoring of unrestricted (hypertextual and hypermedial) access, and the ability for simultaneous information processing,
• An inclination towards incidental, short-term engagements, as well as experimenting, multitasking, and achieving rapid results.

Both students and an increasingly large fraction of teachers are continually broadening their abilities to collect information. This tendency, while expansive in scope, often promotes a superficial engagement with the material, concurrently leading to physical changes in the frontal lobe. This brain region is crucial for encompassing vision, abstract reasoning, and anticipating outcomes. An excessive mental workload increases stress, hampers concentration, and reduces the efficacy of the actions undertaken. These consequences are particularly pronounced in activities requiring heightened awareness and concentration, such as those encountered in school settings.

Embracing Slower Learning

David Handel, the co-founder of iDoRecall, highlights the negative impacts of ‘accelerated’ learning. His company excels in aiding students to thrive academically, utilizing established cognitive science principles. Handel’s own academic journey transformed when he embraced these learning principles. He promotes ‘slow reading,’ an approach facilitating more effective learning. While educational theorists stress reading comprehension, Handel asserts that purposeful learning reading necessitates substantial time. This approach enables metacognition, activating supportive learning and memory retention processes.

This approach contradicts the basic principles promoted by speed reading advocates, especially habits designed to circumvent regression and subvocalization. Regression involves revisiting challenging or misunderstood words, and subvocalization is the silent recitation of words during reading. Personal experience suggests that murmuring text and revisiting previously read sections decelerates reading. Nonetheless, scientific insights affirm that these practices enhance memory retention and information transfer to long-term memory.

Speed reading has its merits and is worth practicing. It proves advantageous when a swift content overview is needed. However, it falls short when deep knowledge acquisition is the objective, as comprehension diminishes with increasing reading speed. If our goal is to learn, we must endeavor to integrate new information with previously acquired knowledge. Only then can we link new content in our minds with what we already possess, thereby paving the way for its potential application in the future.

Understanding Memory Function

To comprehend the principle of slow reading, it is essential to understand how our memory operates. Commonly, we might conceptualize memory as a process of depositing information into our brain’s expansive storage. However, this simplification does not capture the full picture. In the late 1960s, Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin, psychologists at Stanford University, proposed a model comprising three stages of information processing, each with distinct storage durations. The stages are as follows:

• Encoding,
• Storage,
• Retrieval.

The initial step involves not so much recording content as if in a dictionary or encyclopedia, but rather associating it with various contexts derived from our experiences, emotions, and prior knowledge. In other words, we note not merely an individual character, but a specific potential whose value depends on our personal resources, and the time and effort we devote to memorizing a particular content.

Storage, under Atkinson and Shiffrin’s framework, progresses through three subsequent phases, engaging sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. The sensory register briefly holds sensory impressions, such as images, sounds, or tastes. Short-term memory, demanding concentration, links these sensory elements to useful pieces of information already in our possession. This connection facilitates the third stage, retrieval, by sparking mental associations, visualizations, or reflections. This step is integral to tapping into long-term memory and fundamentally strengthens pivotal learning components: reflection, assimilation of new content, and the generation of unique solutions.

Metacognition

True learning and understanding go beyond simply grasping the text we read. Although important, comprehending written material is just one facet of personal growth and maturity. Our reading endeavors should foster the acquisition of new skills, preparing us to tackle future challenges and innovate. This process is akin to forming a web, much like the internet, by creating new mental links with existing knowledge. Slow reading plays a crucial role here, providing not just the means for understanding or briefly memorizing, but for developing a rich network of neuronal connections. These connections integrate our experiences with an array of existing information, practical uses, and emotional responses, thereby activating metacognition — a form of self-reflection on our thinking processes. This intentional self-monitoring is key to enhancing learning efficiency.

Engaging in an internal dialogue while reading deepens our understanding of the material. It is beneficial to ask ourselves questions such as, “What does this mean?”, “What have I learned?”, or “What confirms or disputes this information?”. This practice can lead to numerous metacognitive inquiries, prompting us to consider:

• To what extent am I confident that this is true?
• Is this something I want or need to remember?
• Does this remind me of something from another unrelated field of knowledge?
• Can I think of anything that contradicts this idea?
• What else supports the validity of this concept?
• How does this relate to what I already know?
• Where else might this apply in my life?
• What related ideas occur to me?
• Why is this knowledge valuable?
• What more do I want to discover about this topic?
• Can I break this down into smaller components?
• What element surprised me?
• What intrigued me, and why?
• How can I use this in real-world situations?
• What impact does this new information have on me?
• What further questions do I have after reading?

Posing such questions consciously during reading is essential. Though metacognitive reading may slow our consumption of new texts, it fosters a more profound engagement with new information, enhancing effective learning.

To conclude, slow reading is a cornerstone of in-depth learning. It should not be passive but should allocate time for metacognition. By practicing the principles of slow reading, we not only understand the content we read but also expand our analytical capabilities, assess the utility of the learned content, and cultivate our descriptive language of the world in which we live.

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