Mortimer Adler's How To Read A Book talks about "reading for understanding" a lot. By understanding, he means getting a holistic feel for the content. Grokking, if you will. An analogy is reading a newspaper article on what happened in Gaza yesterday versus reading a 500-page book on the history of Palestine and writing a report on it. In the first example you are reading for facts (knowledge), in the second you are reading for understanding