Study Skills: Strategies for Textbook Reading

As we welcome our new class, I think once again about college readiness. By all current measures, the students in the new class qualify as college ready. In fact, the new students will soon be described admiringly as “tech savvy.” However, while these students certainly deserve to be described as tech savvy, many of these same students cannot be described as “information savvy.”

The new students will find themselves in situations where they encounter a great deal of information, but they must construct the meaning of this information themselves. They were probably taught the skills to accomplish this task many years ago. They spent time learning how to identify essential elements such as topics, main ideas, and supporting details. However, for many students, these skills were deemphasized as they progressed through the educational system. It may have become easier to provide students with knowledge, especially for standardized assessment, than to have students discover and create knowledge from multiple sources of information.

Whatever the reason for the lack of emphasis on these basic skills, we now fnd ourselves teaching students unprepared for dealing with multiple sources of information. We have to reemphasize the need for using the basic skills, and we have to teach new skills that allow them to evaluate sources of information and put new information into their own words. Of course teaching these additional skills as well as the content presents a formidable challenge. Unfortunately, the teaching of content depends on the students’ use of basic skills. Therefore, we can decline to review or teach basic skills, but we run the risk of impairing our ability to teach the content.

I find myself imposing a strict structure for reading assignments in my classes. I have the students identify topics, main ideas, and supporting details. I have even had work sheets that the students must fill out with this information. I do this with information that I would assign to read regardless of the need for basic skills review. So, the students read material that I deem necessary for my class, but I do point to the type of information that I want them to “remove” from the text. I also insist that they put the information into their own words in appropriate situations. I am not willing to continue this practice for the entire course. Eventually, I assign the readings, and the students inherit the responsibility for dealing with the information. I let them know in the beginning that they will eventually deal with these tasks on their own.

In reality of course, the responsibility has always been theirs, but I know some lack the preparation to assume this responsibility. It seems that another layer has been added to teaching.