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Testing for comprehension is truly a search with no end. Educational researchers will tell you that every type of exam is flawed in some way. The general default method, whether it be 3rd graders or the MCATs is to have the student read a few paragraphs and then answer multiple choice questions.
This too is flawed in many ways. From a scholastic perspective, it may be easy to grade but if you have to give them the answer however well masked it may be, it inherently isn't testing there ability to recall from there own memory in entirety.
Besides, in real life, who only has to read a few paragraphs? Books are usually 200pages and sometimes a lot more. And yet the reality is most people after finishing a book recall less than 10% of the content. That's why most reading exams in school were multiple choice. If they gave fill in the blank and short essays almost all the schools would fail!
Actually, we have all heard before the facts about how powerful the brain is and how many supercomputers it is equal to... So it must be possible to learn how to tap into this great mental capacity we are gifted with.
Personally, I've taught at some of the ultimate institutions of the world. Incredible people. Incredible students. Also I taught at some of the best corporations in the world, Hewlett Packard, National Semiconductor, and Xerox. What I found across the board is people when reading for only several minutes start to daydream and wander off mentally.
In extreme cases, some people I observed spent 10 minutes looking at the same page and couldn't remember anything from it. I know many times I'd look around and saw how they taught reading at all of these places and I said, you know what, I always wondered why all the reading tests were only a few paragraphs and used multiple choice questions.
When I taught at the US Air Force Academy, we agreed to give the students a test before and a test after. I looked in England, and I even looked in Russia when I was there and in Czechoslovakia. All their tests were a few paragraphs also.
I came to think the problem should lie in the standardized testing method, which is simply unpractical, and discourages real-life reading. I don't know about you but the books I want to read are a lot more than a page or two. A lot of them are 100, 200, 400, 600 pages and then some. Without brain-motivation techniques, I would never have been able to read them all.
So, back to the Air Force Academy, I said to the professor who was administering the test, why don't we give them a 400-page book before and after. The professor looked at me and said I was crazy. I said, why? He said everybody would fail. I said yeah but who has to only read a few paragraphs out there in the real world.
He was finally convinced, and we switched to use the method indicated in Reading Genius at the Air Force Academy. The people were tested afterwards and they read on average 5.5 times faster and their comprehension improved dramatically for most of the students.
So, forget the way they taught and tested you back in your school days. You too can improve a great deal, when you learn how to use the other part of your brain, the part that hasn't been conditioned when you learned how to read as a kid. We're going to turn that part on. Some people say, we only use 3% of it now. Well in that case you'll use the other 97% by equipping brand new techniques I've suggested. And you will see for yourself
