Title: 3.3 You may not have thought of this: how to read your course materials
Course: RITA LEARNING MODULES > Section: 3. Note Taking for Success

How to read course materials: Active reading

Whatever the specific objective of reading, as a student you will always need to read in an active way. Active reading involves reading with a purpose; that is reading in order to grasp definitions and meanings, understand debates, and identify and interpret evidence. It requires you to engage in reading and thinking at one and the same time in order to:

- identify key ideas
- extract the information you want from the text
- process that information so that it makes sense to you
- re-present that information in assessments, using your own words.

It may involve you pausing at intervals to think about what you have just read, checking that you have grasped the main point and perhaps even noting down questions that come to mind or highlighting key words that you might want to return to at a later date.

Reading your textbook and syllabus thoroughly and effectively can help with your study skills.

- How to read a sylllabus

There are three main techniques that you can use in order to read actively in such a way as to achieve your purpose: scanning, skimming, and focused reading. Let's take each in turn.

The technique of scanning is a useful one to use if you want to get an overview of the text you are reading as a whole – its shape, the focus of each section, the topics or key issues that are dealt with, and so on. In order to scan a piece of text you might look for sub-headings or identify key words and phrases which give you clues about its focus. Another useful method is to read the first sentence or two of each paragraph in order to get the general gist of the discussion and the way that it progresses.

You might want to find information about one topic from a reading but be less interested in some of the other issues included in the reading assignment. One way of extracting this kind of specific information is skimming the article for key words – such as ‘research’ – and statistics which may give you evidence of the effectiveness or otherwise of the scheme. This method is also especially useful when you are searching for something particular that you have previously read but cannot remember exactly where it is located.

Both skimming and scanning generate different kinds of information and can thus be used when you have rather different purposes in mind. However, what they have in common is that they do help you to get an in-depth, more detailed understanding of the article as a whole. A third technique – focused reading – is more useful for this purpose. This is a slower method of reading as it takes the material bit by bit and allows time for active thinking, whereby you begin to process the information presented, and perhaps even jotting down a few notes or questions raised by the material.

A couple of useful note taking methods are:

- Highlighting and Jotting.
- Sketchnoting.
- The Cornell Note Taking Method and Mindmapping will both be discussed in further detail in this module.