My Reading comprehension is much more reliable when I’m writing thorough memory prompts about a text. The process puts me into an active state of mind. I’m on the lookout for anything that seems important; I’m less likely to gloss over key details. And in order to transform those details into retrieval tasks, I usually need to comprehend them in at least some basic way.
Writing prompts is a form of Self-explanation. Non-trivial prompt-writing will generally promote deeper processing of the text. It often involves construction, i.e. when prompts include inferences which aren’t strictly in the text. And it can involve integration, i.e. when a prompt draws connections between different parts of the text, or between the text and prior knowledge. Writing prompts can also be error-correcting: you may notice that you find yourself confused, or that you don’t understand the idea well enough to explain it.
Sometimes I don’t know how to write prompts. Learning to write good prompts is like learning to write good prose: you build up an enormous library of micro-strategies for dealing with different situations. But I don’t (yet) have strategies for writing memory prompts about some kinds of material. For instance, in this book, an explanation of a preferred form for solution sets begins by presenting an abstract symbolic representation; then it delves into several contrasting examples to demonstrate how that form plays out in practice and to give the reader a feel for why it’s expressed as it is. It’s easy to write some basic prompts exercising the abstract symbolic form. It’s much harder to write prompts which involve the subtle points which the examples demonstrate, and the various reasons why this form is preferred. If I really focus and get creative, I can generally figure something out. But often that feels too burdensome, so I’ll just keep moving, sometimes without feeling I’ve explicitly made that choice. In these cases, prompt-writing hasn’t really checked my comprehension. (And, of course, my memory of those details won’t be reinforced—more on that later.)
Prompts create obligations. I want to make sure that I comprehend everything that the author says. But I don’t necessarily want to sign up to repeatedly practice everything the author says. When I lean heavily on memory prompts to reinforce my comprehension, I’ll often feel burdened later by the density of prompts. I’ll find I don’t care about many of the finer details, or that those details are adequately reinforced by later synthesis prompts. I can delete the excess prompts, of course, but there’s a small cost to each deletion decision. And it takes a lot of work to write all those “unnecessary” prompts—much more than, for instance, just explaining the text aloud to myself as I read. Some of that effort produces a more elaborated understanding, but much of it feels like wasted energy.
Shallow prompts, shallow comprehension. When a key definition is provided, it’s easy to write a prompt by simply paraphrasing the definition as given in the text. And that’s a problem because it’s easy to paraphrase without comprehension (McNamara, D. (2004). SERT: Self-explanation reading training. Discourse Processes, 38(1), 1–30). Now, prompts which simply paraphrase the text usually aren’t very good. Prompts often need to distill and elaborate to be effective. So one could respond to my complaint by saying: “just write better prompts!” Sure. But I’ll point out that the medium doesn’t help me do the right thing here. It’s easy to inadvertently write shallow prompts, and to avoid that, I need to both apply constant monitoring—difficult when learning new material—and also spend more effort on prompt-writing—but it’s not always obvious when it’s “worth it”.
It’s awfully expensive. Writing good spaced repetition memory prompts is hard, even if you know how. I find it pretty exhausting—much more so than more traditional Self-explanation.