When a topic is new and might be introduced in every lecture, students will surely find some difficulties in understanding what was delivered, even if the lecturer does their best to bring the knowledge across. When students are asked how much they understand the lecture materials after the class ends, most responded as very limited or only up to 30%. 

Surprisingly, only a few said they understood more than 50% of the lecture, even though they put away their smartphones and paid full attention. Online classes were even worse and most of the students faced more difficulties in understanding the lecture through the online platform.

To enhance for better understanding of the subject materials, they need further reading and more practical exercises.  This is usually very time-consuming as they may need to read a lot of subject materials due to their poor understanding of the lecture topic.

The author carried out an “experiment” with a group of students, who were instructed to do some pre-reading before the lecture. After five lecture classes, they were interviewed ad it was found that they could understand up to 50% and even 70% better compared to having no pre-reading.

Therefore, if the students can capture at least 50% and understand better during the lecture class, they may just need to read a minimum number of subject materials to support and enhance their understanding. This is how the importance of pre-reading before the lecture class comes into play. 

How pre-reading helps?
Students may have some idea of what topics will be covered in the next lecture class through the Subject Outline or Lecture Plan. However, in every lecture, new knowledge or concepts or theory will be introduced, perhaps for the first time, to the students, so the contents can be challenging for them to understand. 

If the students have done some pre-reading for the topic to be covered before the next lecture class, they already have noted and have at least some idea of what learning materials or concepts would be expected and what should be prepared for the coming lecture. When the lecturer explains the topic concepts, they can understand better and more effective because the students already have some pre-knowledge about these concepts having pre-read in advance. 

Furthermore, not only pre-reading prepares them for a pre-understanding of the lecture beforehand, but it also helps the students to prepare or to create some questions from their pre-reading. This will provide opportunities for students to ask questions or to clarify any confusion or misunderstanding during the lecture class. 

How to do pre-reading?
Pre-reading is not easy to most students because the topics they are going to read are normally new, probably difficult or not interesting for them to read. So, they may not have the motivation to initiate the reading. Therefore, to initiate the reading and get some fruitful understanding from this reading, students should cultivate a certain skill for pre-reading.

Below are some suggestions which had been used during the experiment and shown to be useful for pre-reading.

When reading a new topic, the students should just briefly read through the concepts and pay attention to the keywords and terminologies which are the essential points of the reading. It is not a major issue if they do not fully understand the whole reading, except for some concepts or key terms. The students should note down some questions from the pre-reading which can be clarified and discussed during the lecture.

The most important point in doing pre-reading is to try not to push oneself too hard to fully absorb everything from a new topic. Pre-reading should only trigger some pre-knowledge of the topic before the lecture class. What the students need is a brief understanding of the concepts or key terms that will help them enhance and increase their understanding of the lecture during the class.

Therefore, it is worthwhile to encourage the students to spend an hour on pre-reading before attending any lecture or class. This will bring greater benefit to the students in their learning. 

Yeap Boon Han
School of Engineering and Technology
Email: @email