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Reading strategies for undergraduates

This page links to blog posts where I have written suggestions on how to read and annotate for my undergraduate students, hopefully they will be useful to others.

Learning sequences for undergraduate reading
I strongly believe that undergraduate students should read engage in a preparatory sequence (read the book They Say-I Say by Graf and Birkenstein first and then approach resources on how to do active reading. In this blog post I explain my rationale for this suggested sequence of events.

Reading when a paragraph starts with a topic sentence and when it doesn’t
I find articles and book chapters and books really hard (even as a professor!) when writers do not start their paragraphs with a topic sentence. In this blog post, I share a couple of strategies to discern the core idea of a paragraph when it starts with topic sentences and when it doesn’t.

Reading heuristics: sifting through paragraphs, searching for keywords.
When I am limited in the amount of time I can devote to a paper, I comb through the paper looking for specific definitions, phrases, keywords. In this blog post I explain my strategy and the rationale for it.

Triaging your reading workload – how do we choose when to read something more in depth?”
One of the best decision-making techniques that an undergraduate student may want to develop is the ability to triage – triaging means, “deciding what’s most important. Comes from the medical field, determining “who can be saved with the resource constraints we face”? In this post I explain how we can triage our reading load and decide which readings would prove most effective.

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Continuing the Discussion

  1. Developing a repertoire of reading strategies is extremely important – Raul Pacheco-Vega, PhD linked to this post on August 24, 2019

    […] is why I developed an entire page on Reading Strategies (and more recently, one on Reading Strategies for Undergraduate Students). Because while you don’t need to Read All The Things in depth, you DO need to read SOME of […]



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