5 Active Reading Strategies for Textbook Assignments - College Info Geek

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Hey all! This is a follow-up to my last video on reading textbooks, which people seemed to enjoy.

Here's the gist for those who like reading better:

Active reading is simply reading with a deliberate purpose in mind. While there are lots of systems for it like SQ3R, I think they're mostly too cumbersome and time consuming.

The video goes over 5 strategies you can use to read actively:

  • Use the pseudo-skimming technique to identify paragraphs that matter (which you should focus on) and those that are filler (which you can skim).
  • Read backwards: Try going over the review content at the back of a chapter before reading through the main sections. This will prime your brain for the most important parts.
  • Turn section headings into questions which you can answer from notes you take on the details - this aids in using the Quiz-and-Recall method.
  • Pay attention to special formatting - bolded/italicized items and things in lists are often important to note.
  • Mark up your books or take notes on what you read. Here's a screenshot of the notes I've been taking on The Power of Habit http://i.imgur.com/6TGRzIt.jpg

In the last part of the video, I go over three books I'm reading and how I'm using active reading on each on.

Hope these notes are helpful - let me know what you think of the video though!

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 8 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/thomasfrank09 ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Dec 04 2014 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

This is a great video, thanks for this. As someone who struggles with great reading comprehension sometimes I'll definitely try some of these tips out.

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 3 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/Tashar ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Dec 05 2014 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies

RemindMe! 4 Days

๐Ÿ‘๏ธŽ︎ 2 ๐Ÿ‘ค๏ธŽ︎ u/R3D1t ๐Ÿ“…๏ธŽ︎ Dec 04 2014 ๐Ÿ—ซ︎ replies
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Hey, what's up? It's Thomas Frank, and in this video we're talking about active reading. Active reading is a method of reading a book with the intent of pulling something useful out of it. It's different from passively going over the text once to experience it. Right off the bat I'm going to say there were a lot of systems that have been put forward like SQ3R, SQ4R, and lots of other acronym driven systems for active reading, and I think that these systems are too cumbersome, they take too long, and I'm not going to be going over them in this video. I'm not the only one who think this. Instead what I'm going to do is show you how I'm applying active reading to 3 specific books that I've been reading recently, and how I'm able to recall the information better by doing that. First I'm going to give you 5 general active reading tips that you can apply to any reading that you have to do. The first tip is to use a technique called pseudo-skimming. The longer the readings that you have to do are, the more likely a lot of the paragraphs in those readings are going to be filler. That could be background, that could be extra detail, it could be asides. Things like that. Often you don't really need to read these paragraphs all that in depth to get the information you need for your classes. The pseudo-skimming technique is really a paragraph by paragraph technique where you skim each paragraph very quickly, and then you get a feel for the reading and figure out which paragraphs hold the most important information. The second tip is to try to read backwards. A lot of textbooks are not all that exciting. They don't really have a narrative, and you're not going to spoil yourself if you read it backwards, or go to the end. If you want to figure out what a certain chapter is all about, you can first go to the back, look at summary, look at the vocab lists that are put back there, some of the questions, the review items, and get a feel for what the actual chapter wants you to learn in a big sense, like a sky high sense. Once you get that you can start going backwards and seeing, okay, yes. This vocab word was mentioned here. This graphic mentions a topic that was in a review question, etc. Tip number 3 is to come up with questions while you read. When you are going through the chapter, if you are doing pseudo-skimming, or anything else, when something comes up that you don't really know about, then note that down as a question. You can also use the headings, the sub-headings in the chapter as questions. If there's a sub-heading that talks about a specific concept, you can re-word that as a question, maybe even right it down in your notes, and then as you go through the actual content of that section answer the question for yourself. You can do this in review as well. Tip number 4 is to pay attention to the formatting of a text. When I was in college I would do this with almost all of my readings. I would open up the book, I would look at almost every single bolded item, or list of things, and I would pay special attention to those items in the text because they probably were to go over processes that are important to the chapter, or go over vocab terms that are almost certainly going to appear on tests. Pay attention to things that stand out, and their formatting, and not those down. My last tip before I get into some of the books I'm reading is to either mark up the book while you're reading. If you own the book, you can write in it with a pencil, and make notes in the margins, which is really helpful. If you don't, you can use flags, or possibly highlight depending on your schools policies, and I'll show you that in a bit. If you really don't want to mark up your book, then you can take really short bulleted notes on a piece of paper. You can also put questions in there, or you can take flow style notes. I'll throw some of my recent notes up on screen here. These are notes I took in researching textbook reading strategies for these videos in this one, and the last one. As you can see, I took notes on the things I was reading, actually for multiple books, but it ended creating a better picture that I could come back to. It's in my own words, it's in my own terms, so it makes for better recall. Those are my 5 tips, and to round this video out, I'm going to show you a few of the books that I've been reading, and 3 different active reading strategies that I adopted for each book. The first book is, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. This book is about cognitive biases, it's about bugs in human reasoning, and rationality, and decision making. It's a super dense book. I've only gotten to page 145 as my little Ninetails will tell you. If you look at the side of it, I've used flags to markup almost every page that I have read. This is one of those books that's packed with information on almost every single page. Every single chapter mention multiple studies with lots of results, defines different terms, and I was interested in almost everything I was reading here, so as I went through I used flags to markup the book in a non-damaging way. I was reading this book about a year ago. I've become a little bit more okay with marking up my books permanently since then, but the flag method does work, especially if you're renting textbooks, or you plan on selling it later. You can pull them out when you need to when you have good notes for them, and you finished reviewing. It's a pretty good method. The second book here is "Confessions of a Scholarship Winner" by Kristina Ellis, and I'm going through this book because it's a fantastic overview of how to win scholarships. Probably going to put it on my essential books list and create a lot of blog posts, and things on it. This book I went through with a pencil and I would bracket paragraphs that held specific ideas I wanted to review later. I would write notes in the margin underlining specific terms that are really important. As I'm looking back through the book I can see all the spots that I wanted to note for later. I'm going to go through the book a second time once I finish reading it, and take good notes on it. Speaking of notes, the book I've been reading most recently is "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg. If you were to be able to look through this book, you'll see no markings whatsoever. I actually have a third active reading system which is working really, really well for me at this point, and it's just to take notes on the chapter after I've read it. I've created a habit of reading this "Power of Habit" ... I've created a habit of reading this book every single day for at least 15 minutes. I check it off in HabitRPG, and it's something that's becoming a very strong habit for me, so I definitely do it every day. About once every 2 days I finish a chapter. Immediately when I finish reading a chapter, I'll go over to Evernote on my desktop computer, go back through the chapter and write notes in Evernote, which you can see right now on the chapter. I've got a good bulleted summary of almost the entire book right now. Everything that I thought was important in the book is in that summary, and it's going to be about 3,000 words once I finish it, I'm estimating. That's a lot less than what's in the book, and if I want to go back and review what I learned it's going to be much easier, and it's in my own words as well. Those are some of the strategies you can use for active reading. Hopefully you can implement some of these into your studies in order to cut down on that study time, and increase your recall and your ability to do better on tests, and essays, and whatever it is you need to apply your readings to. If you want to get more videos on being an awesome student, then hit that subscribe button below, otherwise I will see you in next week๏ฟฝs video. Hey. Thanks for watching my video. If you enjoyed it, then you can support me by giving it a like on YouTube, or sharing it with a friend. You want to get more videos just like this on being a better college student, then click the subscribe button right there. If this is the last video, a clip of it is playing right below there, and you can click that to watch it. Also you can get a summary and links to anything I mentioned in the video by going to the companion blog post, which you can find by clicking on the orange logo right there. Lastly, if you want to get a free chapter of my book when it comes out, then you can click that book and subscribe to the College Info Geek newsletter. You'll also get notified when new podcasts episodes come out every week. Lastly, if you have ideas for new videos, or you want to connect with me, you can do so on Twitter, or leave a comment on this video. Thanks.
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Channel: Thomas Frank
Views: 852,541
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: college, university, geek, textbook, reading, speed reading, skimming, cal newport, studying, study, finals, assignment, tips, cognitive, retention, recall, notetaking, notes, Student, Book, Graduation, Campus, Students, Books, Education, Library
Id: JL0pqJeE4_w
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Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)
Published: Thu Dec 04 2014
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