FYI: How to Read Your Textbook
{"Image DocumentName": "FYI: How to Read Your Textbook", "Image ImageDescription": "7. Teach someone. The best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else, such as a study partner or friend. 8. Don\u2019t skip the real world examples. Read the Case Studies and In The News boxes in each chapter. They will help you see how the new terms, concepts, models, and graphs apply to the real world. As you read the newspaper or watch the evening news, see if you can find the connections with what you\u2019re learning in the textbook. Here\u2019s the activity I mentioned a few slides back. I have used it many times with terrific results. Find two newspaper articles on topical economic issues. The articles must be (1) short enough that a beginning college student can read either of them in 10 minutes or less, (2) appropriate for the lay reader, and (3) very interesting. Make enough copies for all students in your class. Use different colored paper for each article, e.g. yellow for Article 1 and blue for Article 2. In class, instruct students to pair up. In each student pair, one student is assigned Article 1, the other assigned Article 2. Tell students they will have 15 minutes to read their assigned article. Then, each student will have 5 minutes to teach the contents of his or her article to his or her partner. Tell students it is not acceptable to merely give a paragraph-by-paragraph summary when teaching their articles to their partner. Use your timer or a watch to announce when the 15 minutes are up and it\u2019s time to start teaching. Five minutes later, announce when it\u2019s time for the other student to teach his/her article. Five minutes later, stop the activity and re-group as a class. Ask your students the following four questions. 1) How did you read your article, knowing that you were going to have to teach it to someone in a few minutes? Did you read it the same way as when you\u2019re reading the paper on your own? Explain. Ssummarize their responses on the board; you should come up with a list that includes the techniques they used to read the article. It will include things like I took notes, I tried to identify the main point and the supporting information, I kept going back and re-reading sections of the article, or I kept jumping around the article, looking for connections. After taking students responses, you can add a couple of your own if you like. 2) Having read the article using these techniques, do you think you learned more from it and will retain more than if you read the article they way you would when you\u2019re reading the paper on your own? Explain. There should be a consensus that, yes, using these techniques leads to more learning and better retention. 3) Are there any other contexts in which you might benefit from using these techniques while reading? The students should realize the obvious answer: reading their textbooks. TEN PRINCIPLES OF ECONOMICS. 31.", "Image XResolution": "37", "Image YResolution": "37", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Centimeter", "Image Software": "SlidePlayer", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered"}