I suspect this won't be well received from what I've read in these forums, but I'll give it a go anyway.
First off, a little about myself. I bought the PR course years ago when I was in the middle of a (10-year) period of illness. I was taking daily prednisone, and between that and the illness I mostly stopped reading. Heck, I had troubles focussing on a TV screen, let alone a page of text. Prior to that, I had been an excellent, typical reader, roughly in the 300+wpm category w/90%+ comprehension. In 7th grade, I was tested at reading at the college level, for example. This isn't a brag, just trying to set the stage: I used to read well, enjoyed reading (probably to the detriment of other things, geek that I was), and then lost a lot of that ability and turned to PR to try to recover.
Well, PR didn't work for me then. I doubt it was anything about the course, I really was drugged up and sick at the time. However, now that I'm over that illness (2 years later, actually) I'm finding that my reading ability is slowly returning (though it's a shadow of what I once could do), so I'm picking the course up. One of the things that has helped me recover my reading was, strangely, to write more, so I'm going to continue in that vein and post comments on what I've done so far.
In a word, I find the course soft. Ok, I know it's vogue to be nice & encouraging, but for my tastes it's spread on way too thick. All this talk of relaxing, safe places, guilt, punishing myself, and flowers...blech. How much syrup do I need on my pancakes anyway?
To get through the tapes, I find myself playing games: I imagine that a loud Army drill instructer is conducting the class, and try to imagine how he'd convey the same messages. I don't take the tests "if I have the time"; that's an order, soldier, and you'll do it now and like it!
I really have to wonder if you (and I'm talking to learning strategies right now) are limiting your market with your approach: not everybody out there is scared of failure, or afraid to try something new. I'm sure you could deliver your course with a colder, more straight-forward tone and appeal to a different slice of people than you do now.
One last thing - the star test. IMO, this is a very good test to do up front, before you do anything else. It's easy to do, and prepares people to accept the idea that maybe a different kind of thinking is necessary. At least I was impressed with it and wondered why you didn't do it sooner. (I laughed at my utter inability to trace the star initially: once you introduced the different strategy, it was easy for me.)
-Jeff
P.S. I come into this course expecting it to work: I had my own little experience in college that has convinced me that I can take in information much more quickly than normal reading, at least when the pressure's on and I have to perform.
