Studying and Learning By: Lexi Kadel

What is Critical Thinking Critical thinking is being able to read, evaluate the information, and apply it. Critical thinking is thinking clearly and unclearly. The goal for critical thinking is to go from a poor thinker to a master thinker.

How can you think more critically? There are many learning styles as a learner. –Visual –Visual learners use art, draw images in their notes, color code, and visualize. –Naturalistic –Naturalistic learners observe data, find a pattern, and relate to nature. –Musical –Musical learners listen to music while studying, create rhymes, associate with songs, and form a beat for what the are reading. –Interpersonal –Interpersonal learners give and receive feedback, talk out problems, and work with groups. –Intrapersonal –Intrapersonal learners study alone, set goals, reflect what they’ve learned, and connect the material. –Kinesthetic –Kinesthetic learners perform skits, make games, do hands on activities, and stay active. –Mathematical –Mathematical learners use puzzles, do experiments, look at symbols, and create outlines. –Linguistic –Linguistic learners use words, ask questions, and tell stories.

Before You Read Strategies.

Skimming You can skim through the information you will be reading to get a general idea about what you will be learning about. Simply skim through the title and section heading. You can also skim through the last paragraph. That usually sums up the entire reading.

Count Pages Another strategy is to count your pages and figure about how long the entire reading will take you. Split your reading up so that you won’t take everything in at once. PAGE times MINUTES

Preview Vocab Words When getting ready to look over your reading for the first time you can look through the readings vocab words. Looking at the vocab words, think about knowledge you already know about them.

During Your Reading Strategies

Take Notes You can take notes when reading. Don’t write your notes while you’re reading though, that slows down your process. Only write the important things you think you should know! You can write on a separate piece of paper or on a post-it note.

Highlighting You can also highlight as you read. But, just as with taking notes, don’t highlight while you are reading. Don’t highlight too much and don’t highlight not enough.

Write Questions A good strategy to use would be to write questions in the margins or on post-its. Doing this, you will be able to come back and answer these questions as a study tool. It’s a WIN WIN!

After You’re Done Reading Strategies

Study Vocab When you are finished reading you can go back and look through the vocabulary words. This will help you get the words down better for quizzes and tests.

Answer Questions You wrote questions to yourself for a reason! Go back to those questions and try to answer them as best as possible. This is a great study tool to use to try and burn the information into your brain.

Use the Study Guide At the end of the chapter there might be a study guide. Use this to your advantage. The study guide may have more direct information relating to the test rather than going through all of the information and trying to pick out what’s the most important.

Being Active As a Reader

Making Connections As your reading think about connections relating to the text. You can make connections to… –Yourself –The world –Other thing you’ve read

Being Excited When you’re reading your assignment try being excited about it! Although some things you might not find interesting try and relate those things to activities or thoughts you do enjoy.

Read Out Loud If you are starting to daydream as you read start reading to yourself out loud. This will help make you be more engaged into the text.