Some Reading Strategies

This shows what I gotta read each week for my astronomy course.

This week the topic was reading strategies. Reading strategies can help you a lot when you face an assignment which is to read 20 or 30 pages. For me, reading is very very painful. I like reading, but not too much. I mean I just cannot stay on the ball when I read something. I guess some people are facing the same problem, for example somebody will get tired after 20 pages or 30 pages, so they will begin to find an excuse to stop reading because they just simply don't want to read any more. So 20 pages or 30 pages are their upper limit. However, for me, the upper limit is 3 to 5 pages, or we can say 5 to 10 minutes. It will take long time and lots of patience to fix my upper limit problem, but I can increase the reading efficiency by using those reading strategies. In other words, I can read more before I get tired.

I found something very very useful on page 125. According to this chart, there are basically five steps to do: First, you should survey the chapter. Some books might have introduction or preview or summary, but some books may not have that kind thing. If they do have, then use them because they can help you build an outline or framework. If there is no such a thing, then use the title, they must have titles in each chapter. Second, recall what your professor said about the text. I believe this step is extremely important for those lecture dependent courses. Everything on textbooks is important, but not all of them are important for your course. Third, don't forget those old information which you learned on lecture or somewhere before, when you get new information from textbooks. And then, when you read, you should also pay attention on how the information is organized. For example, when I read my astronomy textbook, I will also focus on the relationship between one information and another, because if you identify each information separately, it is very easy to get confused. The last step is to list some questions and answer them. This step is pretty much a comprehension test. You will see whether you have understood the text or not by listing and answering those questions.

Basically, I use this strategy a lot in my astronomy course since we always have some reading assignment each week. And I found TART and the tactic I just talked above work for me.