You should learn
You should also study the following appendices
You can think of an area of knowledge as being analogous to an area of the earth such as the Rocky Mountain area. An introductory text is like a relief map of the whole area. Its objective is to give you a comprehensive idea about the prominent features, the interesting views, and the challenging things to explore further. Your teacher will be your guide, but your textbook will be your principal source of information. You must get to know your textbook very well. The analogy between a text and a map is a good one for several reasons. Most importantly, just as a map gives a picture of what is known about an area, a text describes the knowledge available at the time it was written. If the field is a relatively new one, the text will be like those old maps drawn by early explorers. They are much better than no map at all, but they may not match the real world very well. Texts are more accurate in well-explored areas, but research is constantly changing our knowledge about them. Hence, bear in mind that a text is a fallible map of an area of knowledge.
One thing this means is that a textbook is not archival; texts become obsolete quickly. Whereas you should treat reference works and literature books with care, texts are intended for heavy but temporary use. Buying a book that someone else has already marked up and keeping your book clean so that you can sell it are ill-advised ways to economize. If at all possible, start with a clean book and mark it up liberally.
Before describing some useful tactics in learning from texts, let me describe the goal. Imagine this: In about an hour shortly before the final exam in the course, you should be able to turn though the pages of the text, notice at a glance what the important points are, and very quickly assure yourself that you understand those points. If you're not sure you understand, other marks on the page should amplify the ideas. You will spend many hours marking up the book while you are learning the material, but you should be able to review the whole course in less than one hour.
Step 1. Survey.
If you were going to lead an expedition through a new area such as the Rocky Mountains, you might just take off in the right general direction and hope all goes well. A better tactic, however, would be o send a scout ahead to search for the best route and alert you to possible difficulties. Similarly, it is a good idea to survey the entire text at the beginning of the course, to survey each chapter when it is assigned, and to survey each section before you start to study it. A survey gives a preliminary overview of the "lay of the land."
During a survey you read the headings and sub-headings, take notice of any italicized or bold-faced words, look at the figures or tables, and then read the summary if there is one. Ideally, a survey tells you what you need to learn. Insofar as possible, try to think up questions that you hope to answer from studying. Having specific objectives in mind guides study just as it guides an expedition.
Step 2. Read.
The importance of reading the text assignment before studying it depends on the difficulty of the text, the instructor, and your familiarity with the topic. Reading is an extension of the survey and is useful when you are not able to formulate your study objectives from a brief survey. It is also crucial that you at least read the assignment before class. For most courses, I found the first sequence shown in the following Table to be best. This is because most of my professors were very good; I found it easier to learn from them first and then study the text.
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The second sequence shown in the above Table is preferable when you find the text relatively easy and the professor more difficult to understand. I have included the third sequence because it is a common one with students who have not yet learned how to learn efficiently. If you wait to study the text until just before the exam, you will learn less because you have missed out on the facilitating effect that the class and the text have on each other.
College learning requires a lot of reading. In preparing assignments, professors tend to be guided by the two-for-one rule (twice as many study hours as class hours for an average grade). In doing so, of course, they have to make some estimate of how fast you can read. If you read more slowly than they expect, their assignments will seem very long to you. Reading skill is therefore very important in college.
There are exercises in Appendix G that should help you evaluate your overall reading skill. Because reading skill is heavily dependent on vocabulary, Appendix H deals with the critical process of learning new words. I urge you to study these two appendices and follow through with whatever additional practice you may find that you need. mproving your reading skills now will be rewarded many times over.
Step 3. Study.
Reading is largely automatic which means that it doesn't require much mental effort. Reading is fine for literature or the newspaper but it is not enough for college learning. Verbal learning requires active participation. . .which is what we mean by studying. To study a text is to process and understand the information in it. To be sure that you are doing so, stop and paraphrase the main idea of every paragraph.
Marking up your textbook helps insure that you are processing the information and your markings also personalize the text for your future use. Recall that your goal is to be able to scan through the book, recall to mind all of the major ideas, and refresh your mind about any ideas that have become fuzzy. So you should mark up the book with that goal in mind.
The best way for you to mark up a textbook is one that you devise for yourself. To the best of my knowledge, there are only two important guidelines: Don't over-mark. To underline everything is the same as underlining nothing. îUse several marking levels. Be able to distinguish key words, main ideas, useful points, and your own thoughts.
I can illustrate these points with my own system, but because I developed this system before highlight pens were invented, you can do much better today. I use multiple, heavy underlines for key words. This makes them conspicuous from everything else on the page. I use they are if I don't remember them when I read the key words. I use single black underlines for useful points, if they are short; for longer sections of useful points, I put brackets in the margin along the lines. Finally, I try to write something in the margin of every page. It may be a question, it may be an insight, but it is usually a succinct summary of what I learned from the text. The only thing about this illustration that I think you should emulate is that it makes me actively interact with the text. I have to decide which are the key words, what are the main ideas, which points will be useful, and what I was thinking while I was processing all that information.
Step 3A. Study Sheets
Some students get excellent grades without marking in their textbooks at all. The alternative study tactic is to make written notes keyed to the pages of the text. Specifically, you can copy the material that you would have underlined on to study sheets in a loose-leaf binder. Obviously, it takes more effort to write than to underline but there is increasing evidence that the more mental effort required to learn verbal material, the better it is remembered. This may be simply because you spend more time thinking about the ideas while you are writing them down. But for whatever reason, a little more effort when you first study a text may save a lot of effort later. There are several other advantages to this study sheet tactic of earning from textbooks.
If you have never tried this alternative study sheet tactic, it will take a bit of practice to learn to use it to best advantage. But I strongly urge that you try it because it is the best method in some situations, and it is the only proper method in the case of studying library books.
Step 4. Review. . .review. . .review.
Perhaps you know that a "half-life" is the time it takes for half of something to disintegrate. For example, the half-life of wastes from nuclear power plants is many thousands of years, which is why it is difficult to dispose of such materials. In contrast, the half-life of original learning is approximately one day. About half of what you learn for the first time from studying a text today will be forgotten by tomorrow. Then half of the remaining half will be lost by day-after-tomorrow, and so on. You will never forget it completely but if you don't relearn it from time to time, you won't remember very much. Increases with the number of times of relearning. Suppose the increase is equal to the square of the number of relearning trials. Then, if you review (and relearn) the text material for a second time, the half-life is now 4 days. After reviewing it a third time, the half-life is up to 9 days. This is why relearning the same basic ideas gets easier and easier. As you remember more, there is less to relearn. Note that you simply can NOT learn it well enough the first time to remember it all. You have to keep relearning it through periodic reviews if you want to be sure to remember it some time later.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of including several review steps in the sequence given on the preceding page. An ideal time to review old materials is right before studying new material. If you take just a few minutes to page through the previous assignment, using your markings to help refresh your memory, you will find that your memory of the material is increased very substantially.
Step 5. Retrieve.
The last step in learning from textbooks is to prepare for the exam over the material. That topic is covered in a separate chapter but it assumes that you have already followed the other steps.