Reading a Textbook

What makes reading textbooks difficult?

• Information is frequently presented in long, unbroken blocks of text.
  
• Textbooks includes broad main ideas, some supporting ideas, and many, many details.
  
• Once you've read and studied a textbook, you're expected to understand, to remember, and to be able to communicate the ideas presented, as well as the details that support those ideas.   

Now that you've considered some of the characteristics -- and challenges -- of textbook reading, you need to understand how good learners read, so you can identify some strategies that will help you be more successful in learning from textbooks.   

What do good learners do?

• Good learners constantly look for meaning in what they read and try to make sense of it.  They think about it, relate it to what they already know, test it against what they already know to assess its validity or accuracy, and  revise or alter their previous understanding of a topic as they add the new information to it.
  
• Good learners can only absorb, manipulate, and manage a certain amount of new information at one time.  They can store in memory a great deal more than they can use at any one moment. 
  
• Most learners are more successful when they understand a subject before they try to stop to master or remember all of the details related to it.  (It's easy to forget what the point of the section was if you're intent on remembering the spelling of someone's name or the date in which a particular event occurred.)

Because of the particular challenges that textbooks present and the characteristics of most successful readers, you will want to use strategies to be more successful.

What strategies can you use?

• You need to be able to break the text up into manageable pieces, pieces that are small enough to grasp and big enough to contain complete units of meaning.   Writers indicate where such "chunks" of meaning begin and end through the use of paragraphs and section headings.
  
• You need to be able to capture some of the information you're learning in writing, so you can look at when you need to use it and free your mind in the meantime to take in more information.
  
• You need to be able to focus on both the ideas contained in a text and the details.  Researchers contend that most of us learn best by first building the general dimensions, the framework of the information by reading for a general understanding of the contents before filling in the details.  So, you need to find the main ideas the author is trying to communicate.

• Once you've identified the main ideas, you've understood the general concepts being presented, you need to be able to connect the details to those ideas.
  

So, you need to begin by reading for understanding.