SCANNING

Reading skills for academic study: Scanning for specific information.

Exercise 1

Read the following text quickly and fill in the table. What do the numbers given in the table refer to?

1%
2%
6%
13%
16%
30%
3/4
86%

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Spoon-fed feel lost at the cutting edge

Before arriving at university students will have been powerfully influenced by their school's approach to learning particular subjects. Yet this is only rarely taken into account by teachers in higher education, according to new research carried out at Nottingham University, which could explain why so many students experience problems making the transition.

Historian Alan Booth says there is a growing feeling on both sides of the Atlantic that the shift from school to university-style learning could be vastly improved. But little consensus exists about who or what is at fault when the students cannot cope. "School teachers commonly blame the poor quality of university teaching, citing factors such as large first-year lectures, the widespread use of inexperienced postgraduate tutors and the general lack of concern for students in an environment where research is dominant in career progression," Dr Booth said.

Many university tutors on the other hand claim that the school system is failing to prepare students for what will be expected of them at university. A-level history in particular is seen to be teacher-dominated, creating a passive dependency culture.

But while both sides are bent on attacking each other, little is heard during such exchanges from the students themselves, according to Dr Booth, who has devised a questionnaire to test the views of more than 200 first-year history students at Nottingham over a three-year period. The students were asked about their experience of how history is taught at the outset of their degree programme. It quickly became clear that teaching methods in school were pretty staid.

About 30 per cent of respondents claimed to have made significant use of primary sources (few felt very confident in handling them) and this had mostly been in connection with project work. Only 16 per cent had used video/audio; 2 per cent had experienced field trips and less than 1 per cent had engaged in role-play.

Dr Booth found students and teachers were frequently restricted by the assessment style which remains dominated by exams. These put obstacles in the way of more adventurous teaching and active learning, he said. Of the students in the survey just 13 per cent felt their A-level course had prepared them very well for work at university. Three-quarters felt it had prepared them fairly well.

One typical comment sums up the contrasting approach: "At A-level we tended to be spoon-fed with dictated notes and if we were told to do any background reading (which was rare) we were told exactly which pages to read out of the book".

To test this further the students were asked how well they were prepared in specific skills central to degree level history study. The answers reveal that the students felt most confident at taking notes from lectures and organising their notes. They were least able to give an oral presentation and there was no great confidence in contributing to seminars, knowing how much to read, using primary sources and searching for texts. Even reading and taking notes from a book were often problematic. Just 6 per cent of the sample said they felt competent at writing essays, the staple A level assessment activity.

The personal influence of the teacher was paramount. In fact individual teachers were the centre of students' learning at A level with some 86 per cent of respondents reporting that their teachers had been more influential in their development as historians than the students' own reading and thinking.

The ideal teacher turned out to be someone who was enthusiastic about the subject; a good clear communicator who encouraged discussion. The ideal teacher was able to develop students involvement and independence. He or she was approachable and willing to help. The bad teacher, according to the survey, dictates notes and allows no room for discussion. He or she makes students learn strings of facts; appears uninterested in the subject and fails to listen to other points of view.

No matter how poor the students judged their preparedness for degree-level study, however, there was a fairly widespread optimism that the experience would change them significantly, particularly in terms of their open mindedness and ability to cope with people.

But it was clear, Dr Booth said, that the importance attached by many departments to third-year teaching could be misplaced. "Very often tutors regard the third year as the crucial time, allowing postgraduates to do a lot of the earlier teaching. But I am coming to the conclusion that the first year at university is the critical point of intervention".

Alison Utley, Times Higher Education Supplement. February 6th, 1998.

Reading skills for academic study: Scanning for specific information.

Exercise 2

Read the following text quickly and answer the questions.

1.   When were X-rays discovered?

2.   Who discovered them?

3.   What are the four characteristics of X-rays?

The Discovery of X-rays

Except for a brief description of the Compton effect, and a few other remarks, we have postponed the discussion of X-rays until the present chapter because it is particularly convenient to treat X-ray spectra after treating optical spectra. Although this ordering may have given the reader a distorted impression of the historical importance of X-rays, this impression will be corrected shortly as we describe the crucial role played by X-rays in the development of modern physics.

X-rays were discovered in 1895 by Roentgen while studying the phenomena of gaseous discharge. Using a cathode ray tube with a high voltage of several tens of kilovolts, he noticed that salts of barium would fluoresce when brought near the tube, although nothing visible was emitted by the tube. This effect persisted when the tube was wrapped with a layer of black cardboard. Roentgen soon established that the agency responsible for the fluorescence originated at the point at which the stream of energetic electrons struck the glass wall of the tube. Because of its unknown nature, he gave this agency the name X-rays. He found that X-rays could manifest themselves by darkening wrapped photographic plates, discharging charged electroscopes, as well as by causing fluorescence in a number of different substances. He also found that X-rays can penetrate considerable thicknesses of materials of low atomic number, whereas substances of high atomic number are relatively opaque. Roentgen took the first steps in identifying the nature of X-rays by using a system of slits to show that (1) they travel in straight lines, and that (2) they are uncharged, because they are not deflected by electric or magnetic fields.

The discovery of X-rays aroused the interest of all physicists, and many joined in the investigation of their properties. In 1899 Haga and Wind performed a single slit diffraction experiment with X-rays which showed that (3) X-rays are a wave motion phenomenon, and, from the size of the diffraction pattern, their wavelength could be estimated to be 10^-8 cm. In 1906 Barkla proved that (4) the waves are transverse by showing that they can be polarized by scattering from many materials.

There is, of course, no longer anything unknown about the nature of X-rays. They are electromagnetic radiation of exactly the same nature as visible light, except that their wavelength is several orders of magnitude shorter. This conclusion follows from comparing properties 1 through 4 with the similar properties of visible light, but it was actually postulated by Thomson several years before all these properties were known. Thomson argued that X-rays are electromagnetic radiation because such radiation would be expected to be emitted from the point at which the electrons strike the wall of a cathode ray tube. At this point, the electrons suffer very violent accelerations in coming to a stop and, according to classical electromagnetic theory, all accelerated charged particles emit electromagnetic radiations. We shall see later that this explanation of the production of X-rays is at least partially correct.

In common with other electromagnetic radiations, X-rays exhibit particle-like aspects as well as wave-like aspects. The reader will recall that the Compton effect, which is one of the most convincing demonstrations of the existence of quanta, was originally observed with electromagnetic radiation in the X-ray region of wavelengths.