Appendix A

Recommended Strategies for Reading Effectively and Making Useful Note or Summaries

When making your notes/summaries, use one or a combination of the following strategies. These strategies should help you to read and synthesize information more effectively.


Go back

Context strategy: Use the context strategy when you have a hard time understanding new terms or concepts. When using this strategy you should search for relationship between concepts/terms you already know and concepts/terms to be learned. When making notes/summaries using this strategy, indicate the relationship that you have found between concepts/terms you already know and concepts/terms you read. In other words, to make your notes meaningful, you may want to jot down terms that you do not know while you are reading, and look them up afterwards.
 



Monitoring strategy: This strategy is very useful and should be used for all types of readings. The monitoring strategy is when you test yourself to find out what you have learned and what you have not learned. Then, you use the information to guide your study and promote learning. One way to monitor is to test yourself after you have completed reading a chapter or a section. For example, write down all that you recall and remember about what you have read, and then check your responses against the original. Do not make your notes/summaries until you have monitored your understanding of the materials you have read.
 


Inferencing strategy: This strategy is related to monitoring because it is inferring or asking questions about the materials studied. It is related to contextualizing because, typically, it explores the relationship of other knowledge to the material being learned. Its objective, however, is for you, as learner,  to generate inferences (or questions) about the material in order to evaluate its truth or importance, or to work out its implications, and to deepen your understanding. Asking the following questions can assist you in making inferences: "Is the author biased?" or, "Can I think of a counter-example?" or, "How would the argument seem if the roles were reversed?", or "What are the implications?". Use inferencing strategy when you read research findings and generalizations made based on those findings. This strategy will help you see how valid and reliable the argument is and how you can use it in practice. Make note cards of those inferences for which  you have carefully tested their truth or importance. Write on your note cards how you tested the truth or importance of your inferences.
 



Instantiation strategy: Often when we are having trouble understanding something that someone is saying, we say, "Can you give me an example?" This is an example of instantiation strategy. When using the instantiation strategy, you should seek out examples that illustrate the concept(s)/term(s) you are trying to learn. Create your own examples or pay careful attention to the examples given. In your note cards, you may either write self-generated examples or state  identified examples from your reading(s).
 
 



Multiple coding: The essence of multiple-coding strategy is to represent the information you want to remember in more than one way. You can do this by paraphrasing, forming images or analogies, weaving the material into examples/stories, making tables or metrics, or any other ways. Based on the content that you are trying to learn, use different coding strategies and then assess their effectiveness.