Speedy Gonzales reading...
Took such a class in high school. Start-of-semester testing indicated that I read faster than normal and retained more than normal.
End-of-semester testing indicated that I read abnormally fast, though I retained only an average (normal) amount.
But here’s the deal: active recall versus passive recall. My super-speedy reading mostly meant that I could recognize correct answers on tests when I was quizzed about what I’d just read, but that I could provide only a general description of what I’d read if I had to write it down from memory, that description sprinkled with main points found in the work, but probably not much detail (though it seems I did manage to pick out details from lists of possibilities). This, then, is passive recall.
Active recall, on the other hand, meant that I could quite accurately tell you what I had read, and in detail, back when I was merely reading quicker than average and retaining more than average.
Comparing the two, I’d take the higher-than-average retention of fast reading versus the merely average retention of speedy reading.
That said...
Did the techniques for speed reading help me read faster? Yes, apparently. For instance, when I was in college, I once took forty minutes to read fourteen chapters of an astronomy textbook prior to a test. Aced the test.
That said...
I much more agree with than disagree with the article in the link posted by
Roger J Carlson (see active versus passive recall, above).
Sheryl Nantus is pretty much spot-on with what ends up happening when you speed read. At first I just read lines more quickly, still “hearing” the words as I went. Then, as I started reading faster, I no longer heard the words. Just saw them. Then I started “reading” them forwards and backwards. Then I simply zig-zagged down the pages. Then I just went straight down the middle of the pages. Then (this sounds hokey and made-up but, hey, it’s what I did...) I looked at the middle of each page and flipped to the next and the next and the next pretty much as quickly as I could turn the pages.
In essence, what the speed reading seemed to do for me was expand the range of my reading vision so that I saw not just individual words, but whole sentences, and then whole paragraphs, and then whole pages. Word recognition, then, just as mentioned in the linked article, was a gigantic part of how this was done. When you see a whole sentence all at once, and every word in it, you “get” it. Same with paragraphs. Which makes me think that pattern recognition must have come into play, especially as it became apparent, with much more reading, that certain kinds of information usually found itself presented in similar ways and, in any given structure, similar places. The reading effect, then, was this:
Concentrate most forcefully here and here and here...
Unlike
Sheryl Nantus, though, I found speedy reading much more useful for nonfiction than fiction. Nonfiction is an information hunt. Fiction is a pleasant wallow. At least for me it is.
Just like
cooltouch, though, I was immediately disappointed to watch my reading speed increase at the cost of reading comprehension. The latter is far more important than the former. Going from above-average retention to average (in this case, our average was said to be 70-percent comprehension) seemed a bad trade-off.
As to this:
Can books (and even courses) improve your ability to read AND learn faster?
Such books and courses may help you increase the speed at which you stuff things into your brain, but that’s not learning. Learning, the ability to understand information and successfully apply it, takes its own time. For that, you’re going to need as much retention as you can get.
