gardner2yr_full

Improving Your Reading

IMPROVING YOUR READING

5.3

With effort, you can improve your reading. Remember to be flexible and to adjust how you read depending on what you are reading. Here are a few suggestions:

Evaluate the importance and difficulty of the assigned readings, and adjust your reading style and the time you set aside to do the reading. How you read your math textbook is different from how you read your psychology textbook. When reading your math textbook, you should have a notebook to record your solutions to the problems. When you read your psychology textbook, you should be highlighting the important ideas or making margin notes.
Connect one important idea to another by asking yourself: Why am I reading this? Where does this fit in? Writing summaries and preparing notes and outlines can help you connect ideas across the chapters.
When the textbook material is exactly the same as the lecture material, you can save time by concentrating mainly on one or the other.

It takes a planned approach to read and understand textbook materials and other assigned readings and to remember what you have read.