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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