Highlighting for reading comprehension: Is two better than one?

Abstract

Reading Comprehension is a crucial part of our everyday lives. Reading is the most frequent mode in which we obtain knowledge. If we are unable to comprehend what we read, then we are unable to learn the information we read. Regardless of how critical the skill of comprehension is to our education, there are few known ways to improve our competence in this area. Highlighting is a popular method among college students of marking material that they feel they need to memorize in order to perform well in their courses. However, it has been shown that highlighting does not improve comprehension unless the material is difficult, and only when the specific piece of information that is inquired about is physically highlighted (Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 2013). The purpose of the current study was to determine if dual color highlighting could help to improve comprehension more than that of the traditional single color highlighting method. The hypothesis was that highlighting text in two colors would force the reader to understand the text enough to make a judgment as to which color should be used to highlight each segment, if any. Presumably, this form of active reading would be expected to create meaning and organization of the material that would aid in the comprehension of that material, as well as simplifying the review of material. Contrary to that hypothesis, we found that dual highlighting did not improve comprehension over single color highlighting of text ,although we found improved comprehension for the highlighted information regardless of highlighting method. Additionally, we concluded that training people to highlight effectively is necessary to improve the comprehension of texts.