Completing this unit should take you approximately 4 hours.
Reading textbooks can be challenging compared to a novel or website. Students often spend lots of time re-reading without remembering what they just read. If you use active reading strategies, you will understand and remember what you have read more successfully. This section will show you how to be a better student by improving your reading skills for two main benefits: prepare you to be more focused when reading to decrease unnecessary reading time and increase your understanding and ability to focus.
Good reading is not simply a matter of taking in information – you need to do more than that. Let's start by looking at what it means to be an active reader.
In this section, you will learn about previewing a text to prepare for reading. This will help you understand the text more clearly and use your time better.
After preparing to read by previewing and predicting, there are other strategies we can use to understand a text passage. In this section, you will learn about skimming and scanning. These strategies will help you find the main idea and details presented in a nonfiction text.
Now that we know some active reading strategies, let's put our knowledge into practice.
The activities below allow you to find out how well you understand active reading strategies. If you have a difficult time recognizing reading strategies and informational text features, you may return to review the information in the Let's Study section and then try these practice activities again.
In this activity, you will make predictions about a reading.
Now that you know basic active reading strategies, let's see if we can easily use them to understand a simple informational text.
For these two activities, use active reading strategies to understand the text and answer the questions.
Watch these videos, which provide a basic overview of some of the active reading skills you have learned about in this unit.
In this activity, you will answer questions about a story by reading and identifying important details.