ABSTRACT
A group of college students is unexpectedly given a journal article to read and instructed to glean as much information from it as possible in 3 minutes. The vast majority of the students begin to read the article’s first sentence and continue reading word for word until they run out of time. Only a few individuals use the “skimming” skills that later questioning demonstrated were present for each of them (Bereiter, 1984). All of the students had knowledge that would have allowed them to learn more efficiently. In most cases that knowledge wasn’t used.
