I’ll be posting sporadically this week because I’m teaching a brand-new series of study-skills workshops. (CCP people — look for flyers in the West Learning Lab, W3-26.) The first workshop is on how to use the textbook, and I thought I’d describe my favorite book trick: reading the book like you’re reading a mystery novel. (I learned this trick and many others from my colleagues, Jay Howard and Joan Monroe, in CCP’s Learning Lab.)
The trick starts with noting that modern science textbooks’ section and subsection headers are usually complete sentences. There’s a gen-bio book in front of me, and flipping to random pages gives me gems like Molecular clocks help assign dates to evolutionary events and The vascular cambium produces xylem and phloem in woody plants. Note that these are subsection headers — titles of parts of the book — not the paragraphs of the main text. You could probably get half the information of the book just by reading headers.
Here’s the trick: Read a header and ask two or three questions about it. If the header is Comnparing anatomical parts can reveal evolutionary relationships, your questions might be: Which parts? What do they reveal about evolutionary relationships? How do you do the comparison? How reliable? If the header is Organelles act to secrete substances, you might ask: Which organelles? What substances? What’s an organelle, anyway?
Flip through your textbook at random. Find headers and ask questions. Most of the time your question will be What is an X? That’s fine: much of biology is about naming and understanding objects and processes. As you gain experience learning biology, though, your questions will become more sophisticated. You’ll start asking things like: What are the monomers? How is that regulated? Are there developmental constraints? You’ll start to ask the kinds of questions that inspire entire research programs.
Anyway, when you open your textbook to study, read the headings and write down the questions. Then read the section with those questions in mind. Read the section with the goal of answering the questions. Don’t treat the textbook like a spy thriller, which you read to find out what happens. Read it like a murder mystery, which you read in order to solve the crime before the detective does.
When you read a mystery, you interact with the narrative in a more engaged way. You say to the detective, “Don’t trust that witness. He’s shifty!” Or, “Why aren’t you noticing the fact that the victim is just five feet tall?” You ask questions, you test assumptions, you give no character or description the benefit of the doubt.
Do the same thing with your textbook. And then, after you read each section, summarize it in the margins. Take notes on what you read.
Do these things, and I assure you that you’ll retain more information, that you’ll doze off less at the library, that you’ll do better on exams, and that you’ll be thinking more like a scientist.
