Effective Studies – 6. Reading

Reading

Reading the course literature after a lecture is an excellent way to do repetition and widen your knowledge. Make small summaries for yourself, use “reading questions”, and discuss with your friends.

Small summaries

When you read your course literature, it is good to make summaries for yourself. It could be after every subchapter or a paragraph that contained a lot of information. Write a summary in your own words, instead of only highlighting the text.

Reading questions

Reading questions (Swedish: instuderingsfrågor) are questions that you should have the answer to after reading a text. In the best of worlds, these are provided by your teacher, and you use them to check that you have grasped the essential parts while reading. If the teacher does not give them, you and a friend can make your own and switch with each other. Doing this, you get two wins: one, you get reading questions, and two, you can compare with each other and see if you have found the same essential parts of the text or if there is anything you have missed.

Discuss

As always it is good to discuss with your friends. Use the reading questions as a starting point and see that you have the same answer to those.

Stay motivated

It is sometimes hard to stay motivated while reading. For me, it helps to set a time goal rather than a page goal. The difference is that I say, “I will read for 45 minutes, then take a break”, rather than saying, “I will read five pages, then take a break”. The reason for this is that it sometimes takes a lot of time to read one page. There could be a lot of new concepts that you need to think a lot about or exciting things you want to look up, and it is important to allow yourself to take the time to do that.