READ and REMEMBER! The SQ3R Method

Want to understand what you read better and actually remember it? Use the *SQ3R* Method! It stands for *Survey, Question, Read, Recite,* and *Review.* In this video, you’ll learn all about using this method when you read. I will discuss each step, so you know exactly what to do. Using SQ3R helps you understand and remember what you read, and it also makes reading easier and more active. Test your understanding of this lesson with the quiz: https://www.engvid.com/read-and-remember-the-sq3r-method/

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In this lesson:
0:00 Read & Remember: The SQ3R Method
2:07 Before You Read: Survey
4:03 Before You Read: Question
5:53 Read Carefully
6:53 Take Notes
8:54 Chapter Review
9:41 After Reading: Recite
11:09 After Reading: Review

Transcript:
Hello, my name is Emma, and today I am going to teach you how to read better. So, when you go to high school or university or even for work, sometimes you have to read very difficult things in English. I'm going to teach you a method today to help you understand what you read better and remember what you read better.

Now, first of all, I just want to show you how I used to read textbooks. So, this is a book from when I was in university. What you will see is everything is highlighted. So, I would take a highlighter, and I would just highlight everything. Now, this is not a good idea. It did not help me remember the information. Instead, what I should have been doing is something like this method, the SQ3R method.

So, the SQ3R method, many teachers use this method when they teach, and it's a method to help you read better. Specifically, there are five steps. The first step is survey. The second step is question. These steps happen before you read, and I will go through each of these steps in detail in a moment. Then we have the third step, which is you actually read. Then the fourth step, recite, and the fifth step, review. These two steps are done after reading immediately. So, by using these five steps when you read, you can understand a lot more, and that is very important when you are reading difficult books, especially if English is not your first language. These tips can also help people who English is their first language, but they're just trying to remember more of what they read.

So now, let's get started by understanding what you do when you survey. The first step in the SQ3R method is to survey what you're going to read. So, I've chosen here a textbook I had to read in university, Principles of Human Physiology. This was a very difficult textbook to read. So, what you can do if you have something difficult to read like this is imagine I'm looking at this page. The first thing I want to do before I read everything is I want to prepare my brain for the information. So, I'm going to look at the pictures, if there's any pictures, try to figure out what the pictures mean. If there's any graphs or tables, I might look at those. I will look at headings. So, right here, I don't know if you see it, but in green, there's a heading. It says structure at the molecular level. I'm going to look at anything that has a heading or a subheading, and I'm going to think about, okay, what is this going to be about? What is this going to tell me about? Another thing I can do is look at anything in bold. So, this page actually has some writing that's in bold, and there are some definitions, so I might quickly look at that. The point is, when I survey, before I read, I look at headings, subheadings, bold text, charts, graphs, and photos, and the point is to start to think, okay, what am I going to be reading about? It prepares my brain for new information, and that's why I'm doing this. It gets you ready for the actual reading you're about to do. This should not take long, maybe a minute or two minutes. It's a very quick thing to do. You're just very quickly looking at what you're going to read before you read it.

The second step in our method is to question. Before you read, it's a good idea to create some questions about what you're about to read. So, the way you can do this is you can open up your book. So, here's the book I'm reading, and again, I find those headings or subheadings, and I can ask questions about them. So, in this case, the first heading I see says dating techniques, so I might ask a question. What are dating techniques? Okay, and then I might look at another heading that says relative dating methods, so I might ask a question. What are relative dating methods? […]