Tackling Assessments

As a student, you are required to read a lot of academic resources, which plays a critical role in your learning. Moreover, reading an academic text is different to everyday reading. Therefore, you need to develop effective reading strategies.

The following “4-S system” helps provide you with different perspectives on the text and increase the productivity of your reading. 

Step 1: Searching

This stage involves searching for relevant sources and gaining an understanding of the contents and structure of the source. To do this, look at:

• the title
• the table of contents
• (chapter) headings and sub-headings
• the description of the book on the back cover
• the book index
• the abstract (summary) and keywords of an article

What do these things tell you about the focus of the source? Does the source look relevant to your topic?

Step 2: Skimming

The next step is to skim the text to quickly identify the main ideas without paying attention to detail. It is a fast process with the aim of locating sections that would be useful to read more carefully later.

To skim, move your eyes quickly across the page looking for important words and phrases.  Focus on the first and last sentences of a paragraph and linking words.

Step 3: Selecting

Read in a focused way to find specific information as per the assessment requirements.

• Scan the text. As soon as your eye catches a key word or phrase, stop.
• Expand the focus and read the material around this word or phrase.
• Does this answer the question? If not, scan the material again.

At this stage you should also be ‘active’ with the text by:

• Marking the relevant sections of a page
• Highlighting, underlining or circling key words and phrases
• Jotting ideas, comments and questions in the margins
• Making summary notes

Step 4: Studying

This is now the time to read the selected text without interruptions to gain an in-depth understanding of the topic. 

• Read from the beginning to end of the selected section.
• Make sure you understand what the author is claiming. Read the heading and/or topic sentence to know what the paragraph is about. Then examine sentence by sentence, looking for how the main idea is explained and/or supported. You should focus on the linking words to help recognise how the ideas are organised.
• Underline any vocabulary you do not know, but do not stop the flow of your reading.
• If the text is relatively easy, make brief notes during the first reading. If the text is difficult, read it through once or several times (depending on the level of difficulty) and once the text is understood, start to take notes.