Reprint of: 
Reading Skills For University Students
Counseling and Development Center
York University, Toronto, Canada
Copyright (Permission Requested)

Along with the very important skills of managing time and making effective notes at university is the task of reading. As you make the transition to university learning, changes in the way you must structure your time are apparent; there is much to do and you may quickly realize that you must take on the responsibility for structuring study and leisure times to be effective. Often, too, the transition to large lecture halls and note-making from lectures may be new to you; you have made notes in class before, but keeping up with the pace and volume of material presented can be a real challenge. Likewise reading changes at university. For many students, though, the changes required are not so obvious as the sharp increase in reading load and difficulty. The transition I mean here is from the kind of reading we've been doing all our lives to a new way of approaching the reading.

As you enter university, reading takes on a central role as part of your approach to learning. It is very important to read independently and effectively to learn significant portions of a course of study. It may be the case that you have failed to develop strong reading skills. You hope that the reading approaches you have used up until this point will work for you. Sadly, too many students read passively, failing to construct accurate comprehension with the guidance of a purpose or goal for reading. The result is that too many students begin to dislike their reading and come to view it as a necessary evil. Reading doesn't have to be an onerous task that you dread. But, to avoid these ill feelings about reading, you will need to invest a little time to develop more active reading strategies. This may be the first time that you consciously use a strategy for reading and so it may feel awkward for a period of time. However, our experience shows, and reading specialists know, that an active approach to reading will likely be more productive and interesting for you.

What does it mean to read actively?

Reading actively actually means a series of things. Perhaps most importantly is that active reading means reading with an awareness of a purpose for reading. Far too often students read aimlessly, hoping that the key ideas will somehow "sink in" and then eventually "surface" when they need to. Having a purpose is another way of saying that you have set goals for your readings. In may university text books, you may find chapters that begin with a brief note on learning goals, but you may find that you pass over these goals in the rush to get to the end of the chapter. You can use goals to focus your attention on specific aspects of a chapter that you are about to read. Without setting goals you are, by default, saying that everything has the same value and that you want to learn it all in the same depth and in the same detail. This can sound like an admirable way to approach reading, but in practice this often leads to frustration when you forget large portions of the text soon after reading. You may find that the information seems to resist structure and logical organization because you have overloaded your mind with new information.

In addition to setting goals and purposes for reading, active reading may involve using the structure of your reading to construct an overview for your reading which you use to select a focus. The structures of the reading materials vary almost as much as the readings themselves, but there are some common features associated with various kinds of readings that readers can make effective use of. Text books, for example, usually contain chapter titles, introductions, headings, sub-headings, bold face or italicized type, and conclusions. They may also contain chapter learning objectives, review questions, summary sections, application sections, and notes and key words in the margins. Clearly these are meant to be used and can go a long way to assisting a reader in understanding and working with the information there. (See "Preparing to Read" below for how to use these structures.) Even if a text has few headings, readers can rely on the structures of the paragraphs contained in the text to access the same kind of information that the more prominent markers indicate: that is, the main divisions of ideas and how the ideas are elaborated. Novels and journal articles are bound by different structures, but an awareness of these can assist in an intelligent approach to the reading of these differently organized texts. The academic introduction to novels can provide a number of guidelines for how to read the novel, for example, and the abstract of a journal article serves the function of summarizing the contents of the article for the reader in simplified language. All of these structures assist the reader in developing an overview of what is about to be read and this allows readers to guide themselves through the text with a focus in mind. (See "Preparing to Read" for more detail.)

Active reading is "thinking intensive"

Active reading also certainly means reading with a view to understand and relate the information to other readings, ideas and themes from lectures, and to the goals of your course and your learning. As well, in the manner we talked about becoming conscious of your approach to reading, active reading involves checking your understanding, monitoring for difficulties, and checking for ways to correct difficulties. It should be clear from these aspects of active reading that active reading is brain intensive; that is, it involves thinking as you read and directing that thinking to achieve certain reading goals. Some students make the mistake of assuming that this means that active reading will be time intensive too and then use that as an argument against doing the work of learning effectively through reading. It is important to know that in fact, active reading has been shown to save time. It does take time to adjust to this new approach to learning, but active reading helps to eliminate the wasteful and often mindless repetition that is necessitated by forgetting what you have read. As well, an active approach to reading involves selecting information relevant to a purpose, which may mean that you are reading only a percentage of what others might be mindlessly reading and that you are reading with better results.

Okay, so active reading involves using strategies or approaches to texts to meet certain goals and is thinking intensive to facilitate learning. What else is implied by the term active reading? Certainly active reading involves thinking about what is read rather than simply trying to memorize it. Often this thinking is aimed at mentally constructing a comprehension of the text by finding information related to your goals. Active reading can also apply to that time just after a reading has been done, during which time we should be asking analytical and critical questions about what we have read (discussed below) because these questions enable us to think beyond simply summarizing and repeating what an author has said. Though in some first year courses you may be able to get by by summarizing what the authors you read are saying, most certainly there will come a time when you will be expected to offer your thoughts on what you have read. If you haven't read well enough to summarize you won't be able to think about the reading -- active reading is a way of approaching reading which goes beyond the bare minimum and engages you in the material in way which perks your interest and drives your curiosity. In short, active reading assists you in doing what you came to university to learn how to do -- think deeply about issues of importance to us in our society.

A final word on active reading

Some students try to make their approach to reading such that they will always read without difficulty. No strategy can guarantee that reading will proceed without difficulty (some difficulty may be a sign that you're working at the understanding). So, as you develop your reading strategies, and as you read through this booklet and encounter a series of suggestions we have about good active reading strategies, remind yourself that it is important to remain flexible in your approach to reading, for different kinds of information as well as for different purposes. In this way you will allow yourself to approach readings in the ways most suited to those readings.

So now you know what active reading is and a little bit about why it is important and what its advantages are. But, how do you achieve this active orientation to reading? The sections below are intended to give you a thorough exposure to a variety of active reading strategies. It is probably not necessary to do every strategy listed all of the time. As you read through this booklet, select a variety of strategies and gradually add those that work to your repertoire of approaches. The end result should be that you become a more active, flexible -- and effective -- reader.

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Last Updated:
Wednesday, July 04, 2007

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