Reading Selectively in History

Description of the Bottleneck

When presented with long sections of reading in history courses, students often assume that they are supposed to memorize all the details. They have difficulty distinguishing between essential elements that they should to remember and details that provide examples of what is being described but that can be forgotten once the basic idea is grasped.

Mental Operations

Mental Task:

1. Historians identify relevant details and forget the others.
2. 2)    To do this, they identify a task at hand and look for material that would help them complete this task
3. 3)    In the context of a course, they would begin by looking at the syllabus and thinking about what had been covered in previous classes in order to make explicit what kinds of questions that they might need to be able to answer to succeed in the course
4. 4)    They would go through the readings paragraph by paragraph, dividing the material into three categories:
5. a.    General statements that would help them answer one or more of the questions that they defined in step 3 above
6. b.    Examples that simply clarify each of these larger points
7. c.    Material that deals with issues that are not related to the issues being dealt with in the course
8. 5)    They would read the examples (b) to be sure that they understand the generalizations (a)
9. 6)    They would mark, take notes on, and/or file in their memory the generalization statements that would help them answer the big questions in this part of the course

They would let the examples and the irrelevant material pass from their memories