Reading & the Lenses Part.2
How can digital photography help students with text-based reading?
INTERVENTION #1
Asking test-students to be more active in their note-taking process by taking cropped photographs of the given text.
Why cropped photographs?
Photographs taken from afar ≈ Photocopying
This results in “photo-taking-impairment effect” (Henkel, 2013)
Zoomed-in photograph
involves actions taken
by photographers
This eliminates photo-taking-impairment effect (Henkel, 2013)
Q: WILL THIS PROCESS
WORK WITH TEXTS?
PROPOSED PROCESSES:
STEP 1: Taking zoomed-in photographs
Becoming actively involved through the process of taking a photograph eliminates external distractions; students had to focus and make decisions upon how a photograph would look.
STEP 2: Cropping the photos further if necessary.
Cropping process ≈ saying ‘NO’
to unnecessary information
We are then left with pieces of information which are then stored in our brain.
Q: What happens when we review the cropped-photos again?
Seeing the cropped-photos should allow the brain to retrieve other related information that’s not in the photographs since the cropped-photos can trigger us to remember the elements outside the zoomed-in frame.
It worked for me, but what about others?
TIME TO TEST THE IDEA.
The Chosen Text for This Experiment.
STUDENTS COULD CHOOSE
ANY NOTE-TAKING METHOD.
Instruction:
Please make notes of this text as if you’re going to have an exam on it.
EXAMPLE NOTES BY TEST-STUDENTS.
BUT THESE POPULAR NOTE-TAKING METHODS AREN’T THE MOST EFFECTIVE. WHY?
HIGHLIGHTING and UNDERLINING
Highlighting and/or underlining is not effective because it can “get in the way of learning” since “it draws attention to individual facts, it may hamper the process of making connections and drawing inferences” (Roediger, 2013)
SUMMARY NOTE
“[…], we sometimes find that our notes, not withstanding their faithful rendition of parts of the text, are somewhat incoherent. […] We are then placed in the position of having to search out the book again.”
(Taylor, 2009)
WHAT ABOUT USING PHOTOGRAPHY?
Instruction:
Please use photography to make notes on this text as if you’re going to have an exam on it. You’re encouraged to take “cropped-photos”; you can take as many photos as you like, and modifications to the photographs are allowed.
EXAMPLES BY TEST-STUDENTS
Test results show that a higher percentage of students who adopted the use of photography had better recall of the text compared to those that did not.
However, the majority of test participants had claimed that the photographs taken did not make it easier for them to remember to the text.
This could be due to the fragility of episodic memory, and the lack of emotional impact from the information (Harvard Medical School, 2012) since the photographs of the text itself might not relate to any other memories the test-students had.
Additionally, research on the enactment effect by Roediger & Zaromb (2010) “has shown that people better remember actions that they have performed than actions they have only thought about or observed.” (cited by Henkel, 2013).
Consequently, photographers may remember the action of taking a photograph rather than the actual scene itself.
What can this assumption lead to?
Continue reading part.3 at: ___________
Reference: Hegarty, J. (2014). Hegarthy on Creativity: There Are No Rules. 1st ed. London: Thames & hudson Ltd, pp. 52–53.
