Guides · Reading
Reading a chapter start to finish and highlighting as you go is the slowest possible way to learn what is in it.
Textbooks are not written to be read like novels, but that is how most students read them: start at the first word, go to the last, highlight anything that looks important. An hour later the chapter is bright yellow and you could not say what it was about. The problem is not attention or intelligence. It is that linear reading gives your brain no framework for deciding what matters, so it treats everything as equally important and retains almost none of it.
The method below is a practical version of what reading researchers have recommended for decades under various acronyms. It takes about the same time as a linear read and produces a set of notes and questions you can actually review.
Before reading anything in full, skim the chapter for its skeleton:
Read the summary and the end-of-chapter questions first, not last. They tell you what the author thinks matters, which is a very good predictor of what your teacher will test. After five minutes you should be able to say in one sentence what the chapter is about and list its three or four main parts. If you cannot, skim again; do not start reading in full yet.
Go back through the headings and, for each, write a question it should answer. A heading that says "Causes of the French Revolution" becomes "What were the causes of the French Revolution?" A heading that says "Osmosis" becomes "What is osmosis and how is it different from diffusion?" Write these in the cue column if you are using Cornell notes, or on a separate page.
This step feels pointless and it is the one that makes the rest work. Reading with a question in mind turns a passive activity into a search. Your brain now knows what it is looking for, and it will notice the answer when it arrives.
Read the first section (from one heading to the next) with its question in mind. Do not take notes while reading, and do not highlight. Just read, and read until the section ends.
Then close the book, or cover the section, and answer the question from memory, in writing, in your own words. A few phrases are enough. If you cannot answer it, you have learned something important about that section and you should reread it, this time knowing what you are looking for.
Only after answering do you open the section again and check. Fix anything wrong in your answer. Add anything important you missed. This closed-book answer is your note for that section, and because it was produced from your head rather than copied from the page, it is far more likely to still be there next week.
Repeat for each section. A twelve-section chapter becomes twelve short question-and-answer pairs, which is a review sheet and a flashcard deck at the same time.
When you finish the last section, close the book and do a two-minute recall of the entire chapter: main idea, main parts, how they connect. Compare it to the summary you read in step 1. This catches the case where you understood every section individually but cannot see how they fit, which is exactly what essay and synthesis questions test.
Highlighting is one of the most popular study techniques and one of the least effective, and the reason is simple: marking a sentence requires no understanding of it. Students highlight what looks important, which is usually anything in bold or anything with a number in it, and then when they review, they reread the highlights, which is rereading with extra steps.
If you must mark the book, do it on a second pass, after the closed-book answer, and limit yourself to one or two phrases per section that you specifically want to find again. If you find yourself highlighting more than that, you are avoiding the harder work of deciding what matters.
A thirty-page chapter read linearly with highlighting takes most students around an hour, and produces highlights. The same chapter read this way takes around seventy minutes, and produces a set of twelve to fifteen questions with answers in your own words, a whole-chapter summary, and the knowledge of exactly which sections you did not understand. The second hour of studying, if there is one, can then go directly to those sections instead of to rereading the whole thing.
The questions you wrote are also ready to be entered into the Flashcard Builder for spaced review or the Practice Quiz Generator for a self-test before the exam. Nothing about the chapter needs to be reread from the book again.