How to Get Your Mind to Read

How to Get Your Mind to Read
Consider “I promised not to play with it, but Mom still wouldn’t let me bring my Rubik’s Cube to the library.” The author has omitted three
facts vital to comprehension: you must be quiet in a library; Rubik’s Cubes make noise; kids don’t resist tempting toys very well.
One experiment tested 11th graders’ general knowledge with questions from science (“pneumonia affects which part of the body?”), history (“which American president resigned
because of the Watergate scandal?”), as well as the arts, civics, geography, athletics and literature.
In one experiment, third graders — some identified by a reading test as good readers, some as poor — were asked to read a passage about soccer.
The last National Assessment of Adult Literacy from 2003 is a bit dated,
but it offers a picture of Americans’ ability to read in everyday situations: using an almanac to find a particular fact, for example, or explaining the meaning of a metaphor used in a story.
When things got more complex — in comparing two newspaper editorials with different interpretations
of scientific evidence or examining a table to evaluate credit card offers — 95 percent failed.