Improvement of the Degree of Understanding through a Five-day Class in the Beginning Level of Kurita's Speed Reading Course

Kurita's Speed Reading System was proposed in 1987. A consistent education started in 1991, and 418 classes ended by July, 2003. The purpose of the training is to shift; the conventional paradigm of character information to a new method. The degree of understanding of reading through a beginner's training class was examined in this study. Subjects were 66 adult participants of a five-day beginners classes.The reading speeds before the training were 830 characters/min on average. The reading speed after the training was 23919 characters/min on average, and the magnification became 31 times on average. The degree of understanding of the conventional reading before the training was 31% on average. It was directed at the 10th step that subjects read the same length of the sentences within 1 minute, and the degree of understanding of the reading was 67% on average. This suggested that the ability of understanding increased. The degree of understanding of the speed reading at the 10th step was 59%, 51%, 44%, and 38% on average with respect to 2000, 3000, 4000, and 5000 characters/min speed reading, respectively. This means that the degree of understanding of 5000 characters/min speed reading was higher than that of conventional reading. Moreover, at 10 step, it was directed that subjects performed speed reading with the constant degree of understanding. The results were 9151, 7002, and 5664 characters on average (i.e.,11, 9, and 8 times on average) with respect to degree 30, 40, and 50% of undrstanding, respectively. This means that speed reading with degree 30% of understanding (which is almost identical to that of the conventional reading, i.e, 31%) was faster by ten times than the conventional reading. These results shows that the participants of Kurita's speed reading attained not only the high speed of reading but also high degree of understanding of reading.