This sounds a lot like (a subset of) incremental reading. Instead of highlighting, one creates “extracts” and reviews those extracts over time to see if any of them can be turned into flashcards. As you suggest, there is no pressure to immediately turn things into flashcards on a first-pass of the reading material. Thesetwo articles about incremental reading emphasize this point. A quote from the first of these:
Initially, you make extracts because “Well it seems important”. Yet to what degree (the number of clozes/Q&As) and in what formats (cloze/Q&A/both) are mostly fuzzy at this point. You can’t decide wisely on what to do with an extract because you lack the clarity and relevant information to determine it. In other words, you don’t know the extract (or in general, the whole article) well enough to know what to do with it.
In this case, if you immediately process an extract, you’ll tend to make mistakes. For example, for an extract, you should have dismissed it but you made two clozed items instead; you may have dismissed it when it’s actually very important to you, unbeknown to you at that moment. With lowered quality of metamemory judgments, skewed by all the cognitive biases, the resulting clozed/Q&A item(s) is just far from optimal.
I’ll have to look more into this, I’m sure that this task has been thought through to a greater depth than mine. At first glance, it seems like their pre-flashcard unit, the extract, is longer than mine.
This may be because I’m working from a textbook, and it’s all relevant enough to the course that everything “seems important” and is thus worthy of making an extract. So there’s a need for an intermediate stage between creating an extract and creating a flashcard. This need is what progressive highlighting seeks to address.
Thanks for sharing, I think this will be a great resource for my task analysis of scholarly reading.
So there’s a need for an intermediate stage between creating an extract and creating a flashcard. This need is what progressive highlighting seeks to address.
I haven’t actually done incremental reading in SuperMemo so I’m not sure about this, but I believe extract processing is meant to be recursive: first you extract a larger portion of the text that seems relevant, then when you encounter it again the extract itself is treated like an original article itself, so you might extract just a single sentence, then when you encounter that sentence again you might make a cloze deletion or Q&A card.
I guess the “funnel model” of reading doesn’t seem quite right to me somehow? Like, I want to actually read all the words. I think they’re probably almost all important at first for getting the meaning across to me. Not to mention the larger sections—of course I want to read those.
It’s just that I know that without a kind of swallow-it-whole approach to reading that is akin to extremely massed practice, I will really struggle to remember the bits, much less tie them together into a cohesive, synthesized form of larger meaning.
So their model seems to be a progressive approach to narrowing down and re-reading that eventually arrives at making flashcards, which then are used to maintain knowledge over the long term.
My model is more like a shallow goldfish read that quickly arrives at flashcards, crystallizes the important bits of knowledge, and then proceeds to re-reading in order to arrive at fuller understanding. I think the swap is in the order of flashcards vs. re-reading—they recommend re-reading before making flash-cards, while I recommend making and practicing with flash-cards before re-reading.
This sounds a lot like (a subset of) incremental reading. Instead of highlighting, one creates “extracts” and reviews those extracts over time to see if any of them can be turned into flashcards. As you suggest, there is no pressure to immediately turn things into flashcards on a first-pass of the reading material. These two articles about incremental reading emphasize this point. A quote from the first of these:
I’ll have to look more into this, I’m sure that this task has been thought through to a greater depth than mine. At first glance, it seems like their pre-flashcard unit, the extract, is longer than mine.
This may be because I’m working from a textbook, and it’s all relevant enough to the course that everything “seems important” and is thus worthy of making an extract. So there’s a need for an intermediate stage between creating an extract and creating a flashcard. This need is what progressive highlighting seeks to address.
Thanks for sharing, I think this will be a great resource for my task analysis of scholarly reading.
I haven’t actually done incremental reading in SuperMemo so I’m not sure about this, but I believe extract processing is meant to be recursive: first you extract a larger portion of the text that seems relevant, then when you encounter it again the extract itself is treated like an original article itself, so you might extract just a single sentence, then when you encounter that sentence again you might make a cloze deletion or Q&A card.
I guess the “funnel model” of reading doesn’t seem quite right to me somehow? Like, I want to actually read all the words. I think they’re probably almost all important at first for getting the meaning across to me. Not to mention the larger sections—of course I want to read those.
It’s just that I know that without a kind of swallow-it-whole approach to reading that is akin to extremely massed practice, I will really struggle to remember the bits, much less tie them together into a cohesive, synthesized form of larger meaning.
So their model seems to be a progressive approach to narrowing down and re-reading that eventually arrives at making flashcards, which then are used to maintain knowledge over the long term.
My model is more like a shallow goldfish read that quickly arrives at flashcards, crystallizes the important bits of knowledge, and then proceeds to re-reading in order to arrive at fuller understanding. I think the swap is in the order of flashcards vs. re-reading—they recommend re-reading before making flash-cards, while I recommend making and practicing with flash-cards before re-reading.