Miller, SQ3R: Applying Critical Thinking to the Reading Process (2012) Narrated by Charles Catton

[Music] The literary tradition of the Western world begins with the Greek poet and Bard, born about 800 years before Christ. Because the alphabet of the Greeks was known only to a small coterie of priests and scholars, the great blind poet Homer was almost certainly illiterate. And because he could not read, Homer sang some 12,000 hexameter lines of the Odyssey and even longer Iliad, and he sang them from memory.

Homer’s audiences listened rapidly to his voice, immersed in his stirring tales of gods and men. But for today's audiences, reading has replaced listening, the eye has usurped the ear. Today's writers no longer require the great feats of memory and performance employed by Homer and the lesser troubadours of antiquity.

But, like Homer, the authors of our age do have a voice. As readers, we must strive to hear their voices with our eyes. In a world flooded with written and visual data, the ability to read efficiently and effectively as an essential skill for every citizen of a literate society.

It attains even greater importance for students and members of the professions. Skillful reading - reading that squeezes key data from an article - is the primary means of attaining professional and intellectual growth. Our brains have the power to do this and more if we harness critical thinking to the reading process.

This lesson will introduce you to some simple procedures that will make you more adept at deciding what information should be remembered and train you to become better at retaining it. We call this process SQ3R. We will begin by talking about your reading habits and how you remember.

Next will go step by step through this critical thinking process we call SQ3R. We also talk about how it can be used for academic triage - those times when you are pressed for time and need to extract and retain keep data very quickly. The lesson will end with a short review of the Process.

How do you read? Like this? It's happened to most of us, reading, Especially, nonfiction can sometimes be monotonous at best and occasionally even downright boring.

Have you ever finished reading an entire paragraph and then ask yourself, “what have I just read? ” and discover that you couldn't remember anything? Reading nonfiction articles and books can be a Challenge.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could read like this person? What can we do to make those dry scholarly articles and book chapters that we have to read engaging - even interesting? How do we know what to focus, on what's important and what isn't?

Our capacity to recall data is limited, yet Homer was able to remember and recite more than 12,000 lines of verse. Even today, the Homeric tradition lives on as bards in Turkey and in the Balkans can still recite long epic poems from memory. So, even though our ability to remember has its Limitations, we know it's possible to remember a great deal more than we normally do when we read, which begs the question how do we remember?

Cognitive psychologists theorized that our memory data is organized in units of knowledge. In order to add data to these units, we must relate what we've read to what we already know. What we bring to the book or article while reading is as important as the information that the writer wants to convey.

It's true the writer is not present, but we can hear his or her voice in the text. To make the information stick, we have to lend our own voices to the process. This means having a dialogue with whatever it is you're reading.

You might ask, “how would someone go about having a dialogue with an article about air power? ” Good question. This is where SQ3R comes in.

It's a critical thinking protocol that will jumpstart your conversation with the text. In the SQ3R protocol, the S stands for Survey and Skim. The Q stands for Question.

The 3 R's are Read, Recite, and Review. But the first real step in SQ3R is knowing how to exploit the text. Once you exploit the text, you'll be able to hear and respond to the voice of the author.

Once you know how an academic text is organized, you can use it to glean the most important information that it has to offer and incorporate that data into your own units of knowledge. Literary and scholarly traditions around the world have their own rhetorical styles, each reflective of their respective cultures. Academic writing in the English-speaking world has a unique organizational pattern that typifies the way we communicate in many social contexts.

As you might expect, the pattern for English speakers is direct and linear. An article will usually begin with an introduction that expounds broadly on the selected topic and then moves inexorably toward the specific point or the points to be argued or Presented. As an alternative, some authors may choose to open an article with an anecdote or some other attention-grabbing device rather than a general statement, but in all cases the purpose of the introduction is to draw readers in and lead them to the main Points.

The introduction also cast a net that is wide enough for readers to begin the process of relating what they already know in general about the topic. In academic articles, the introduction inevitably leads to the thesis statement. The thesis is the point or the points that the author will discuss in the article.

The thesis statement may be one or more sentences long and generally introduces all the main points that the author will present. The thesis statement is most commonly found at the very end of the introduction. The next section in this linear straightforward organization is the body.

The body typically contains a section for each main point described in the thesis. In short articles or Chapters, a main point can be just one paragraph long. For longer pieces that can comprise several paragraphs or even Pages.

The final section in an academic paper is a conclusion the conclusion is like the introduction turned upside down. It typically begins with a brief restatement of the thesis and then rehashes some of the points made within the article as it moves toward more general statements. There are of course exceptions to this general organizational pattern.

Some academic papers will end with a discussion section or an implications for further study section. But all academic articles will begin with an introduction and the thesis statement and end with some form of conclusion. As mentioned earlier, the steps in the sq3r protocol are Survey, and Skim, Question, Read, Recite, and Review.

Let's look at Survey first. What we do is we survey is to preview the article, but this kind of preview goes a bit deeper than a two minute movie trailer. The primary purpose of surveying or previewing the article is to activate your current knowledge.

You do this by reading the article subtitles and Headings, if there are any. You also need to look at all the visuals inserted in the article or chapter. This includes Pictures, charts, graphs, and drawings.

Also make sure you read all the captions to the pictures and charts. This will activate your units of knowledge and begin the data assimilation process. You should also make predictions about the article.

Make guesses as to what the article is about. Begin questioning the author in your mind as you look at the non written visual elements of the text. Skimming is the other side of the S and SQ3R.

The skim gives you a bird's-eye view of the article or chapter. Do this after you've finished your survey. This title skim is not the simple method of running your eyes down the page to extract key information.

The SQ3R skim requires discipline. But it will help you to understand and absorb the key points. This step-by-step process will allow you to extract key information in a relatively short timeframe.

First, read the introduction or the first paragraph or in longer pieces such as book chapters the entire first Section. Next, locate and read the thesis statement in the introduction. Underline, Highlight, or make a note of the thesis and the main points.

Then skip to the end of the article or chapter and read the conclusion or the last paragraph or the last section. Finally, see if you can locate the restated thesis within the Conclusion. Now we come to the real heart of skimming.

Here once again we exploit the text to extract key information. You may recall from your elementary or middle school days that a topic sentence contains the main idea of a paragraph. It acts much like a thesis statement in this context.

You may also recall that the topic sentence is usually but not always the first sentence in the Paragraph. With this in mind, go back to the beginning of the article’s body and read the first and last sentences of each paragraph. The last sentence in the paragraph often acts like a conclusion within the paragraph.

It also sometimes acts as a hook, moving the reader on to the topic in the next paragraph. Either way, the last sentence often contains valuable information that can help you to get a firm grasp of the Article’s main ideas. In addition, as you read look for keywords, usually in italics.

Highlight underline or note these and any other difficult words that you encounter. However, keep moving at a good pace - don't stop to look up the words while you're skimming. Let's review how to survey and skim an academic article using the SQ3R protocol.

After surveying the article or chapter by looking at pictures charts and graphs and reading any captions that appear, make predictions about the article’s topic and main points. Now you're ready to skim. First, read the introduction and locate the thesis statement and highlight or underline it.

Then read the Conclusion, and locate the restated Thesis. Highlight or underline it. Next, if you're reading a longer article that has several sections in the body, read the first and last paragraphs of each Section.

Finally, read the topic sentence and the concluding sentence of each paragraph in each section. You might still be a bit hazy about what a thesis statement is. It isn't something that every high school or college composition class teaches and if you haven't done any academic writing for a while, you may have forgotten.

So, before moving on to the Q of SQ3R, let's do a short Review. The thesis statement is the sentence or sentences that usually appear at the end of the introduction that communicates the main points of the chapter or article. The thesis is also usually found in the first few sentences or paragraphs of the conclusion.

Now let's see if we can find the thesis statement in a journal article. You Were you able to locate the thesis statement in the introduction? What did it tell us about the article?

You're right. It told us that the article will describe various types of culture shock and how this type of shock is related to the more general category of transition shock. The Q stands for question and this is what turns reading into a dialogue with the author.

You should start questioning right from the beginning. When you survey, you can frame your predictions as questions. This will make you feel as though you're in a Conversation, or in some cases in an argument with the writer.

After you finish surveying and skimming, you now read the entire article or chapter, asking questions throughout the process. Ask yourself who what when where and how Questions. It's also a good idea to write them down as they come to mind.

Also as you read check the predictions that you made during your skimming to see if your guesses were correct. For example, when reading Janet Bennett's article, you might ask what exactly is transition shock? While you read, highlight or underline key areas make notes in the Margin.

If you have problems Understanding, mark those difficult areas of the text and study them more closely during your review. Once you've finished reading the article or chapter, look at the questions you jotted down as you surveyed, skimmed, and read. See if you can answer them now.

Think back to the predictions you made. How close were they to what the author actually said? To help you put it all together, write a short summary of each section of the work.

Then do your best to recite key information from the article without looking back. You might also try constructing an oral summary and recite it to yourself. If you're having problems understanding main ideas and important vocabulary, read the article again.

In this final step, survey the article or chapter once again and review your questions. Verify your predictions and revise. If you haven't already done so, see if you can connect what you've read to your experience or other things that you've Read.

What, you say you don't have time for all this? SQ3R can also help you perform some academic triage. What is academic triage?

It's those times when life gets in the way and you don't have time to be as thorough a reader as you would like to be in a perfect world. When circumstances or events are conspiring against you, use SQ3R to your Advantage. First, exploit the text.

Do just the survey, skim, and question steps of the protocol. No time for even that? Well, do as much of the full SQ3R process as you have time for.

You'll draw much more from an article by just the survey, skim, and question steps than if you plow through the first five pages of a 15 page article and have to stop for lack of time. SQ3R will not transform you into a latter-day Homer, but it will help you become a more active reader - one who makes predictions and questions while reading, and it will lead you quickly the key information in an article or chapter. Remember to always exploit the text.

Locate the introduction and conclusion and the thesis statements within those sections. Engage in an active dialogue with yourself and the author as you read. Read the article or chapter and then quiz yourself with the questions you've asked and summarize the article to ensure comprehension.

When you review, survey the text again and try to link its content to your own experience. Remember, it's still important to read the entire article to get the full benefit of the author's ideas, but when life gets in the way SQ3R can help you perform academic triage. Good luck as you progress through the program, and happy reading!