A Script for Better Textbook Reading

Do you hate reading textbooks? Do you stare at the text blindly hoping that the words will automatically make connections with neurons? Would you rather surf that internet-thing and find the answer to the meaning of life? We all would. But the fact of the matter is that you are in college and reading is essential. One of the purposes of selecting and using a textbook is because a professor cannot teach every little detail during class, so the text is there to provide more examples and clear things up.

Professors carefully choose the book(s) based on relevance to the course and because a professor feels that you will gain something out of the book. Like most professors I read every chapter and every word of the textbooks that I consider for use in a course in order to select the one that (a) I feel you will get the most out of and (b) is the best option of the course. (Just so you know: Most professors don’t consider book price when selecting a text and they shouldn’t if they want to find a good book.)

Anyway, since I selected a book that you should be able to gain something from reading (something other than a headache), I thought that I would share with you a little script for better reading. This method, which is easy to master, helps you elaborate on material you are reading, while you are reading. Specifically, by using this method you should be able to read a chapter and gain more out of it from a single reading than simply reading a chapter over and over until the information is crammed into your cranium.

The method is called SQ3R (Robinson, 1970), which some of you may have used in the past. My 7^th grade history teacher (yes, I can remember back that far) had us use this method for reading our history books and I continued to use this method throughout high school and into college.

SQ3R is an acronym for Survey, Question, Read, Recite/write, and Review. It entails five steps for reading that will have you actively thinking about and elaborating on the text that you are reading. The method will increase your reading time slightly, but you will gain much more out of the reading. You should use this method when reading a single chapter or a section out of a chapter, not an entire book at once.

1. Survey (Take approximately 1 Minute) Before actually reading, simply look through the chapter and look at the section headings and sub-headings. Think about what the headings mean and why the subheadings are where they are. Try to identify several major themes and ideas contained within the chapter.

2. Question (Take less than 1 Minute) Come up with a question: ‘What is this chapter trying to tell me?’ or ‘What questions do I have that I want this chapter to answer?’ Continue to do this for each major section of the chapter and each subsection. Basically, before reading, create questions that the chapter can hopefully answer.

3. Read (Depends on how fast you read) Read one section, or even just one sub-section, at a time. While you are reading, keep the question for that section in mind and try to answer it through reading. That is actively search out the answer to your question for that section. This part of the process requires a lot of concentration and critical thinking, so do this in a relaxing environment where distractions are minimal.

4. Recite/write (Take about one minute) When you have finished reading the section and have found the answer to your question, write down some key phrase or idea that sums up the section and answers your question. Use your own words and ideas, that is, put the answer to the question that you were searching for into your own words. This way, you are actively trying to produce an answer to your question; hence, actively learning and elaborating. It is often good to put these key phrases into the margins of your book or into a separate area of your notebook for the course. This way, these ideas are stored in one location.

5. Review (Take about five minutes) Once you have finished the chapter after repeating steps 2-4 for each section t is time to see what you have learned; that is, it’s time to see if you retained any of the information that you were just reading about. For one example, cover up all of the key points that you wrote down in step four and try to simply recall them from memory. If you forget one, then you know that that is a section that you may need to focus on.

You may also want to try to recall the key phrases in reverse or random order. Another idea is link all of the key phrases together into pairs of relevant items. Still, you may want to look through all of the key phrases from step four and elaborate off of each of those key phrases. The possibilities are endless!

Reference

Robinson, F. P. (1970). Effective stud (4^th ed.). New York: Harper & Row.