Moving toward active reading: constructing a scaffolding tool for inquiry based reading on e-books

Abstract

Reading actively helps students become better readers. Unfortunately, students in modern education system have to acquire so plentiful knowledge in textbook that they absorb them all passively like sponge absorbing water [1] without active participation and thinking. Therefore, strategies have been proposed to teach students active reading. Questioning is a very important strategy for successful active reading. In this paper, we synthesized some reading strategies such as SQ3R, self questioning, and QARs into “inquiry based reading”. The main spirit of inquiry based reading is “asking questions” and “finding answers”. However, it is difficult for most students to implement while reading. The reason can be generalized as two major problems: (1) students have no capability to ask questions and (2) they have no motivation to ask questions while reading. As a result, we bring up a training process and a scaffolding tool on an e-book to solve these two problems. A validation of the instrument is processed containing 32 undergraduate students. The results show that students who used the scaffolding tool have learned inquire based reading better after training.