Does Speed Reading Actually Work?

Speed reading courses promise several thousand words a minute with full comprehension. The research does not support it. Beyond a certain rate, the gains come out of comprehension rather than efficiency, and the trade is rarely worth making.

What does survive scrutiny is less glamorous: structured approaches such as SQ3R, which front-loads surveying and question-forming before reading and closes with recall and review. It is slower per page and better per hour.

Our research team went through the claims and the evidence behind them, and set out what a realistic reading system looks like when it is built from techniques that actually replicate.

Read the full research: Does Speed Reading Actually Work? on Speed Learning Research.