How can students effectively study texts?

Reading and studying texts is one of the primary sources of learning.  It is very important for students to know how to best study texts.  They need to know this for while they are in school, but they also need to learn it for when they leave school, when reading will be one of their only sources of learning. 

Chapter 10 of Content Area Reading gives several tips on how to effectively organize and learn from texts.  There are two methods that they mentioned that I like.  One was using graphic organizers, and the other was writing summaries.  A good use of graphic organizers is to make them to reflect text patterns.  If a text involves comparing and contrasting, readers can create a matrix involving the subjects and the categories for how they similar and different.  If the text is about sequencing things like facts, events or concepts, students can create a series-of-events chain.  Another graphic organizer is the network tree.  Readers can create this show the relationship between central ideas and its attributes and examples.  Using these graphic organizers, readers can visually see the organization of a reading.  They can thus better see how the reading all goes together and better understand its meaning. 

The other method I mentioned was writing a summary about the reading.  By summarizing, readers break a text down to its essential points.  They are thus are able to extract the main ideas from texts, while excluding non-essential information.  By teaching students how to summarize texts, I think teachers are teaching students how to truly understand texts.  They are teaching them how to critically read so as to get the necessary and important information from the texts.  If a person can properly summarize texts it is because they can properly understand them.  Thus, being able to summarize texts is a necessary skill for understanding what one is reading.