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Research Skills

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When reading for academic purposes, try to be clear about your motivation at the start.

 

 Ask yourself why you are reading a particular work:

  • Are you reading for an assignment or an exam?
  • Are you reading to get ‘background’ knowledge, or to get a deeper understanding of a specific topic?
  • Are you reading to find or understand a point or argument?
  • Do you need a thorough grip of the material, or do you need to scan for the main ideas or specific information?

 

The way you read may change depending on your motivation. If you just want to get a general overview of a text, you can scan it for the main ideas. This involves reading through the text quite speedily, noting the main points or the general argument. For example, you could scan the introduction or concluding chapters of a book, or the ‘abstract’ of a journal article, which summarises the article content.

Academic reading is a skill (or, a set of skills) that – as with all skills – improves with practice.

Reading is one of the essential activities of studying. Most courses involve substantial amounts of reading. Your lecturers will provide you with reading lists, setting out the texts that they would like you to read for the subjects covered in your modules.

These readings are carefully selected to help you gain a deeper understanding of the subjects covered in lectures.

Sometimes, these lists are quite long. You may not be expected to read everything on your reading list.

 

Some reading lists include:

  • Essential reading: students are required to read these titles (must read)
  • Recommended reading: expands on a specific subject; useful for increasing a student’s knowledge of the subject (read selectively)
  • Further reading: useful and relevant background to a subject if there is time (could read)

Note-Making

A skill that is linked to reading is the skill of note-making.

Creating good quality notes on a topic can really strengthen your learning. Transferring what you learn in class or through further reading and research into your own words, with your own examples, helps you to recognize what you know and where there might be gaps in your understanding.

For any topic that you study, you will have a range of material (your own notes, notes from lecturers, videos and recordings, books and journal articles, assignments, past exam papers etc.). The goal of good note-making is to condense these many sources into a concise and complete set of notes.

Your notes should be original (written in your own words) and unique (distinct from other student’s' notes). Creating notes like this will help you to see themes and make connections that may not have been apparent before and should provide you with a very useful resource for revision.

SQ3R

SQ3R is a reading comprehension technique termed for its five steps:

  1. Survey - skim the material and get a feel for the main topics and ideas in the text
  2. Question - create and use questions to guide your reading
  3. Read - as you read look for answers to the questions you created
  4. Recite - stop and recall your questions and see if you can answer them from memory
  5. Review - once you've finished the text, go back over all the questions you created. If you cannot answer them, look back and refresh your memory

Follow the steps to learn how to gather as much information as possible from the readings you require for your modules.

 

Remember: The information you get from reading is important. If you just “do it,” without learning something, you’re wasting your time. Train your mind to learn while reading with SQ3R.

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