5 Active Reading Strategies for Textbook Assignments - College Info Geek — Transcript

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1. 0:00Hey, what's up?
2. 0:01It's Thomas Frank, and in this video we're talking about active reading.
3. 0:04Active reading is a method of reading a book with the intent of pulling something useful
4. 0:09out of it.
5. 0:10It's different from passively going over the text once to experience it.
6. 0:14Right off the bat I'm going to say there were a lot of systems that have been put forward
7. 0:17like SQ3R, SQ4R, and lots of other acronym driven systems for active reading, and I think
8. 0:23that these systems are too cumbersome, they take too long, and I'm not going to be going
9. 0:27over them in this video.
10. 0:28I'm not the only one who think this.
11. 0:29Instead what I'm going to do is show you how I'm applying active reading to 3 specific
12. 0:33books that I've been reading recently, and how I'm able to recall the information better
13. 0:37by doing that.
14. 0:38First I'm going to give you 5 general active reading tips that you can apply to any reading
15. 0:41that you have to do.
16. 0:42The first tip is to use a technique called pseudo-skimming.
17. 0:45The longer the readings that you have to do are, the more likely a lot of the paragraphs
18. 0:50in those readings are going to be filler.
19. 0:52That could be background, that could be extra detail, it could be asides.
20. 0:56Things like that.
21. 0:57Often you don't really need to read these paragraphs all that in depth to get the information
22. 1:02you need for your classes.
23. 1:04The pseudo-skimming technique is really a paragraph by paragraph technique where you
24. 1:08skim each paragraph very quickly, and then you get a feel for the reading and figure
25. 1:13out which paragraphs hold the most important information.
26. 1:16The second tip is to try to read backwards.
27. 1:18A lot of textbooks are not all that exciting.
28. 1:20They don't really have a narrative, and you're not going to spoil yourself if you read it
29. 1:24backwards, or go to the end.
30. 1:26If you want to figure out what a certain chapter is all about, you can first go to the back,
31. 1:30look at summary, look at the vocab lists that are put back there, some of the questions,
32. 1:35the review items, and get a feel for what the actual chapter wants you to learn in a
33. 1:40big sense, like a sky high sense.
34. 1:42Once you get that you can start going backwards and seeing, okay, yes.
35. 1:47This vocab word was mentioned here.
36. 1:50This graphic mentions a topic that was in a review question, etc.
37. 1:53Tip number 3 is to come up with questions while you read.
38. 1:57When you are going through the chapter, if you are doing pseudo-skimming, or anything
39. 2:01else, when something comes up that you don't really know about, then note that down as
40. 2:04a question.
41. 2:05You can also use the headings, the sub-headings in the chapter as questions.
42. 2:09If there's a sub-heading that talks about a specific concept, you can re-word that as
43. 2:13a question, maybe even right it down in your notes, and then as you go through the actual
44. 2:17content of that section answer the question for yourself.
45. 2:20You can do this in review as well.
46. 2:22Tip number 4 is to pay attention to the formatting of a text.
47. 2:24When I was in college I would do this with almost all of my readings.
48. 2:27I would open up the book, I would look at almost every single bolded item, or list of
49. 2:31things, and I would pay special attention to those items in the text because they probably
50. 2:36were to go over processes that are important to the chapter, or go over vocab terms that
51. 2:40are almost certainly going to appear on tests.
52. 2:43Pay attention to things that stand out, and their formatting, and not those down.
53. 2:48My last tip before I get into some of the books I'm reading is to either mark up the
54. 2:52book while you're reading.
55. 2:55If you own the book, you can write in it with a pencil, and make notes in the margins, which
56. 2:59is really helpful.
57. 3:00If you don't, you can use flags, or possibly highlight depending on your schools policies,
58. 3:04and I'll show you that in a bit.
59. 3:06If you really don't want to mark up your book, then you can take really short bulleted notes
60. 3:10on a piece of paper.
61. 3:11You can also put questions in there, or you can take flow style notes.
62. 3:15I'll throw some of my recent notes up on screen here.
63. 3:18These are notes I took in researching textbook reading strategies for these videos in this
64. 3:22one, and the last one.
65. 3:24As you can see, I took notes on the things I was reading, actually for multiple books,
66. 3:29but it ended creating a better picture that I could come back to.
67. 3:32It's in my own words, it's in my own terms, so it makes for better recall.
68. 3:37Those are my 5 tips, and to round this video out, I'm going to show you a few of the books
69. 3:41that I've been reading, and 3 different active reading strategies that I adopted for each
70. 3:45book.
71. 3:46The first book is, "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.
72. 3:49This book is about cognitive biases, it's about bugs in human reasoning, and rationality,
73. 3:53and decision making.
74. 3:55It's a super dense book.
75. 3:58I've only gotten to page 145 as my little Ninetails will tell you.
76. 4:02If you look at the side of it, I've used flags to markup almost every page that I have read.
77. 4:09This is one of those books that's packed with information on almost every single page.
78. 4:14Every single chapter mention multiple studies with lots of results, defines different terms,
79. 4:19and I was interested in almost everything I was reading here, so as I went through I
80. 4:24used flags to markup the book in a non-damaging way.
81. 4:29I was reading this book about a year ago.
82. 4:31I've become a little bit more okay with marking up my books permanently since then, but the
83. 4:37flag method does work, especially if you're renting textbooks, or you plan on selling
84. 4:40it later.
85. 4:41You can pull them out when you need to when you have good notes for them, and you finished
86. 4:44reviewing.
87. 4:45It's a pretty good method.
88. 4:47The second book here is "Confessions of a Scholarship Winner" by Kristina Ellis, and
89. 4:52I'm going through this book because it's a fantastic overview of how to win scholarships.
90. 4:56Probably going to put it on my essential books list and create a lot of blog posts, and things
91. 5:01on it.
92. 5:02This book I went through with a pencil and I would bracket paragraphs that held specific
93. 5:06ideas I wanted to review later.
94. 5:08I would write notes in the margin underlining specific terms that are really important.
95. 5:14As I'm looking back through the book I can see all the spots that I wanted to note for
96. 5:18later.
97. 5:19I'm going to go through the book a second time once I finish reading it, and take good
98. 5:23notes on it.
99. 5:24Speaking of notes, the book I've been reading most recently is "The Power of Habit" by Charles
100. 5:31Duhigg.
101. 5:33If you were to be able to look through this book, you'll see no markings whatsoever.
102. 5:36I actually have a third active reading system which is working really, really well for me
103. 5:41at this point, and it's just to take notes on the chapter after I've read it.
104. 5:46I've created a habit of reading this "Power of Habit" ... I've created a habit of reading
105. 5:51this book every single day for at least 15 minutes.
106. 5:54I check it off in HabitRPG, and it's something that's becoming a very strong habit for me,
107. 5:58so I definitely do it every day.
108. 6:01About once every 2 days I finish a chapter.
109. 6:03Immediately when I finish reading a chapter, I'll go over to Evernote on my desktop computer,
110. 6:07go back through the chapter and write notes in Evernote, which you can see right now on
111. 6:12the chapter.
112. 6:13I've got a good bulleted summary of almost the entire book right now.
113. 6:17Everything that I thought was important in the book is in that summary, and it's going
114. 6:21to be about 3,000 words once I finish it, I'm estimating.
115. 6:24That's a lot less than what's in the book, and if I want to go back and review what I
116. 6:28learned it's going to be much easier, and it's in my own words as well.
117. 6:32Those are some of the strategies you can use for active reading.
118. 6:35Hopefully you can implement some of these into your studies in order to cut down on
119. 6:38that study time, and increase your recall and your ability to do better on tests, and
120. 6:42essays, and whatever it is you need to apply your readings to.
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