(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Robinson was an American educational psychologist.
He believed that effectively studying books is a skill, not an innate talent, and that by learning a deliberate and structured approach, anyone could improve their comprehension and retention. His approach is named SQ3R: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review. It was designed to help students engage with texts and retain information over the long term, and remains a generally useful approach for learning from non-fiction in particular.
Before reading, you should survey the book: quickly scanning the chapter or text to get an overview of the content (F. P. Robinson 1961, 29). Look at the title, headings, subheadings, charts, and summary paragraphs. This should take only a few minutes. It helps to create a mental schema for the material: a framework for the reading to come. This allows you to orient yourself to the text’s structure and major ideas before you hone in on the details. Begin with the big picture, not the first word on the first page. Robinson suggests how to practise this skill (p. 31):
Take some reading material on topics with which you are familiar, e.g., newspapers, digest magazines, previously read textbooks, etc., glance over the headings in an article or a chapter, and then make guesses as to what the material will actually say. Check to see how well you have done.
Based on this survey we should actively generate questions about the material. We can turn “boldface headings and italicized phrases” into questions to guide our reading (p. 19). This serves “to arouse your curiosity and thereby increase your comprehension” (p. 29). By reading with a specific purpose, you become an active participant in the learning process, searching for answers instead of passively absorbing information. This “skill is an ability to make an attitude-shift at the start of each section and ask oneself “Well, now, why are we going into this?”” (p. 34).
With these questions in mind, you read the text to find their answers. Robinson urges students to make this an “alert, active search” and not a “passive, plodding along of each line” (p. 29). Read one section at a time. Focus on your chosen questions to help filter out irrelevant information and identify the most salient concepts.
When you find answers you can make a note of them, however, this practice threatens to distract you from reading and occupy too much time. In fact, the habit of excerpting what you read into your notes can result in the note taking substituting for the reading: creating the note feels like you’ve read and remembered the passage (p. 31). Instead, Robinson suggests writing “working notes” from memory and only at the end of section (pp. 31–32). They should be “positive phrases”, in an outline form to visually indicate the relationships between ideas, and very brief: “little more than a word or a phrase” (pp. 34, 32). They should be meaningful to you specifically, precisely because you have read the material; if they’re fully comprehensible to a stranger you’ve been too verbose (p. 32). Underlining can help this process, but should also be done at the end of a section, only used for the most important points, and use “a numbering or marking system that shows relationships among the points marked” (p. 38).
Robinson suggests that people’s habit of reading “fiction in order to forget their troubles and not to remember what is in the book” can carry over to reading non-fiction and give rise “to a delusion that since the ideas are comprehended as they are read they will, of course, be remembered and unconsciously organized as answers to questions” (p. 31). This is wrong; to learn, “the reader must know what he is looking for, look for it, and then organize his thinking on the topic he has been reading about” (ibid.). This explains why actively formulating questions is an important habit to learn, but also suggests that we can adapt the questioning step to novels so that we remember more of them, too.
Our “tendency in reading is to keep going”, but instead, after reading a section, we should pause, look away from the book and try to answer our questions from memory, using our own words (ibid.). This is the recital step, but that doesn’t mean a literal speaking aloud. Actually, reciting by writing is often more effective because “it forces the reader actually to verbalize the answer, whereas a mental review may often fool a reader into believing that a vague feeling of comprehension represents mastery” (ibid.). Interweaving reading and recital prevents you from conducting long, uninterrupted reading sessions in which you were ostensibly studying, but in fact weren’t paying attention. If we don’t test our understanding, it’s illusory, and if we can’t explain the answer in our own words, we don’t understand it. It’s important to express the concepts in a way that makes sense to you, and to derive your own examples of them, in order to demonstrate a true understanding of the material.
Having finished reading a chapter in this way, go back and reflect on your learning. This should not take more than about five minutes (p. 33). Review your notes to get a “bird’s-eye view of the points and of their relationship and check your memory as to the content by reciting on the major subpoints under each heading” (p. 30). Try to mentally recall these main concepts and the structure of the chapter. This review should be done soon after finishing (e.g., later that day) and again periodically to combat forgetting (p. 33). This helps consolidate the information in your memory, and ensure that you understand how all the pieces of the chapter fit together.
Is this method only applicable to textbooks, though? Certainly the structure of textbooks, their organisation and “cues” make them easier to study (p. 15). Non-fiction is generally “written that the expert reader can know what the main idea is even as he starts to read a section and is able to skim, skip, or study in the right places”, whereas we tend “to read fiction straight along”. So, the SQ3R steps need to be modified for different forms of literature. Instead of clearly-delimited sections with informative headings, the reader may need to find other logical divisions at which to pause and reflect. Most significantly, the questions answered by the text won’t be as clear. When students are assigned works other than textbooks, for example, “the survey step consists of thinking why the book was assigned and looking over the preface and chapter headings for an over-all orientation”, then the next step involves turning these points into questions (p. 40). In the case of fiction, which we raised above, Robinson suggests the following questions as starting points (p. 44):
- What techniques has the author used to make his writing particularly effective in attaining his goals?
- What subjective or emotional purposes has this piece of writing?
- What outstanding episodes or quotations in the selection should be learned because they are often referred to by well-educated people?
- What did you think of this piece of writing? What effect did it have on you?
- In what way have you learned to select and appreciate better forms of aesthetic or emotional expression?
- What was the writer’s intent in producing this particular selection?
SQ3R can seem like a time-consuming procedure, but Robinson argues that its benefits and efficiency make it worth mastering for students. It can be applied without assistance or secondary materials, which also makes it useful for self-directed learners outside of formal education. It constitutes an active reading which takes advantage of a text’s structure and textual cues to guide a purposeful search for answers. By insisting on low-effort note-taking, and their regular recital and review, Robinson’s approach provides a practical path to learning from texts.