In my last post, I asked if you were remembering to do what works for you when it comes to using study methods and completing assignments, and to evaluate how you fared this past year, both with teacher-suggested and/or required study methods, as well as with any methods you chose to use without their input. My focus in that post was on completing assignments and preparing for tests, but as you should know by now if you are a regular reader of my blog, those are not the only two things you must do in order to have good study skills. In this post, I will focus on using study methods and completing assignments that require you to keep up with your reading. If you remembered to include keeping up with your reading along with your other assignments when you were evaluating your progress after reading my last post, that’s great, but if you didn’t, that’s okay. As I’ve said before, treating assigned reading the same way you treat written work, as something that must be completed in a consistent, timely fashion, can be one of the greatest challenges to developing good study skills, but the better you are able to become at doing it, the more improvement you will see, not just with your reading, but with your study skills across the board.
Just as with using study methods and completing assignments in other subjects, the best place to start when it comes to evaluating how you’ve done with assigned reading over this past year is with required study methods and assignments. In addition to evaluating how well you kept up with the reading itself, usually by reading assigned chapters or pages each night or each week, make sure you also evaluate how well you kept up with any notetaking method, assigned comprehension questions, or other written assignments that went along with the reading. I have said before that falling any more than a week behind on your reading will adversely affect your comprehension of the material, and that catching up each weekend and/or reading ahead each weekend is a good way to avoid it, but it is just as important, if not even more important, to make sure that you do not fall any more than a week behind on the work that goes along with the reading. The further behind you fall, the more likely you will be to cut corners with notetaking and other assignments, which will negatively impact not just your comprehension and preparation for quizzes or tests on the material, but your grades on the assigned work as well. Keeping up with both your reading and your assignments, each night as much as possible and on the weekends as needed, will increase the chance that you will take better notes and write better, more detailed information on other assignments. Not only will this improve your grades on those assignments, it will also provide you with study materials for quizzes and tests, so you will be able to improve those grades as well. If you have kept any of the work you did on reading that was assigned at the end of last year or earlier this year, you can check to see how well you did with it and what you’d like to still improve, but if you didn’t, just apply as many of these suggestions as you can to what you are currently reading, including going back to earlier chapters and reviewing what you wrote to see what you might like to add in advance of any test or assignment that covers the entire work. Whether you choose what you are currently reading or something you read earlier that you feel you did well with, keeping the tests and assignments from one of the books you read can serve as a good guide for summer reading, and/or a place to start when you are assigned reading in the fall, so you can continue to build on the progress you’ve made with both your reading and your study skills this year.
If you have chosen to add your own notetaking and/or study methods to what your teachers require you to do with assigned reading, or have received permission to adapt or modify what they have assigned based on your learning style and/or challenges, make sure you evaluate not just how well you did with any changes, but also how much of a difference they made. If you added extra study methods to those that were required, did you do it consistently? Did you see a difference in your grades based on whether you used those methods or not? Did using your own methods take too much time away from what was required, or affect the quality of your work? Should you ask for assistance with what is required, or ask for permission to make changes to it? If you already have permission to do things differently, were you as consistent with those methods as you should have been? Did you keep up with them and not allow yourself to fall any more than a week behind, just as you should have if your study methods and/or assignments were not changed in any way? Whether you use only required methods, only chosen methods, or a combination of the two, all the consequences of not keeping up that I outlined in the previous paragraph still apply. Just as I said in my previous post about the rest of your studies, so too with assigned reading: if what works for you involves adding to or changing requirements in any way, making sure it works for you means making the commitment to doing it the right way, over time, to the best of your ability, and it also means being willing to consider making changes if what you thought would work is not making as much of a difference as you were hoping it would.
Though the previous two paragraphs were mainly about your approach to the assigned reading of literature, a lot of the requirements, suggestions, and questions about your progress I posed in them relate to assigned reading in other subjects as well. Keeping up with notetaking and/or assignment requirements, adding study methods to them that work for you and/or asking permission to make changes to what is required will all benefit you more if you keep up with the reading of the material as well. Just as with literature, keeping up with reading in your other subjects will keep you from cutting corners with written work, and will help you be more prepared for tests, because it will give you more time to review the material and prepare any extra study materials you might need. If you find you are doing these things better than you were last year at this time, make sure to keep doing them through the end of the year, and to plan to carry them into the year ahead. If you are still trying to figure out what works for you when it comes to keeping up with your reading in all your subjects, it’s not too late to commit to doing better through what remains of this year, and it’s not too soon to think about what you might do differently next year. Whether for literature, your other subjects, or both, figuring out what works for you when it comes to keeping up with your reading is a great way to improve your study skills.
Remembering to do what works doesn’t only apply to the study methods you use and how you keep up with your written assignments. Keeping up with your reading, in literature as well as in your other subjects, can be one of the hardest things to do to improve your study skills, but remembering to include it when you are figuring out what works for you will go a long way toward increasing both your progress and your success.