Over the past few weeks of the semester, I have mastered the art of reading my Clinical Psychology textbook and finding the most effective ways to extract the most important information. With midterms season upon us, here are three of my personal favorite study tips for reading a hefty textbook:
- Don’t be ashamed to highlight everything
For me, highlighting while I’m reading keeps me from losing my pace and getting bored of reading. When my marker runs its color throughout the reading, I feel like I am actively reading, a technique essential to understand the information at hand. I recommend underlining with your highlighter the lesser important sentences, and fully highlighting the more important concepts. Ignore the filler words like “is, “or,” “can,” etc., and focus solely on keywords.
2. Practice active recall
When finishing a section or paragraph in your reading, try to come up with a one-sentence summary of the content you just read. If you can’t think of anything, you didn’t read well enough. Active recall is crucial to not only understanding information, but also retaining it.
3. Read the chapter summary/key terms several times
After you’ve finally completed a chapter, you may be tempted to close the book and never worry about that reading again. As attractive as this sounds, chances are this approach won’t do you any justice in the long run-in terms of remembering the information. Instead, read the summary and key terms at the end of the chapter at least 2-3x with breaks in between to completely lock in all the information you just learned.