All 3 of my sons went through the gifted program, and when the first one tested, the district director asked for a meeting with me because she had never seen such high scores. She wanted to know how I was teaching him. I told her that I taught him to think 'conceptually', to think about what things really are, not just what they're called.
This conceptual thinking is also what I believe leads to faster processing speed. Processing is the conceptualizing stage of reading. It is when you comprehend the material. It is when the words form ideas and when the ideas become assimilated in your mind.
There is a new site that uses this approach to teach reading effectiveness,
www.readspeeder.com. It is free and isn't selling anything. The site looks a little low-budget, and may not be the easiest to understand at first, but it is amazingly effective. I think it's the only place that can display text highlighted into real thought-units.
The basic approach of this method is to concentrate primarily on improving comprehension as a MEANS to improve reading speed. In other words it's primarily about learning to process the ideas more efficiently by learning to focus on ideas versus words.
