Active Reading and Note-Taking: Introduction

It's hard to think of two skills that are more crucial for academic success in college than having the ability to read efficiently and effectively and the ability to take good notes in class, what we call active reading and good, robust note-taking.

Here's the tricky thing about these two skills, most people think they already have them. That's because if you know how to read, you think you know how to read actively. And if you know how to write something down in class, you might think that you know how to take really good notes.

And some of you, I'm sure, do. But the fact of the matter is is that college is going to push you to your academic limits and it's going to require things of you intellectually and academically that have not been asked of you before, and so it's incredibly important to make sure that these skills are up to snuff and that you're fully enhanced and ready to go. So we want to think about active reading a little bit differently, and we want to think about note-taking a little bit differently than maybe you thought about them in high school.

One thing to be really clear about off the bat is that there's a lot of good information on the internet and a lot of really excellent research done on these two particular academic skills, the skill of reading efficiently and effectively and the skill of taking good notes in class.

So our strategies will not be exhaustive, but what they will be is a really helpful starter, a helpful primer for you to make sure that you're ready to go when it's time to go to the college classroom.