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Reading and Understanding...

Intelligence is the faculty that allows you to assimilate new concepts and to find relationships among ideas; in other words, to adapt to new situations by resorting to your cognitive skills, such as reading, solving mathematical operations, memorizing, imagining, etc.: the faster you adapt, the smarter you become.

The most important thing is to make associations and to assimilate concepts, not to remember data. If we first develop these fundamental intellectual skills, later on it will be easier to piece together memories by association of ideas.

We should always explore the chapters that come before and after the one we are studying now. If we develop a broader perspective of the context of the chapter under study, our brain will assimilate and understand concepts faster and more efficiently. If you still have doubts about these reading and studying techniques, keep reading. They will surely clear up in the pages to come.

Steps for a succesful learning:

1.- Where to study?
The ideal study environment is a quiet, warm, and well-illuminated room. Apart from that you only need a chair with a straight back, a desk with adjustable height, and an adjustable book stand. Don't clutter your desk and put up a sign in front of you to inspire you, such as "Are you loosing concentration?" or "Keep up the good work." Make the best of what you have: organize your work according to your possibilities.

2.- Initial attitude:
To optimize your study session, relax. Begin with simple, short relaxation exercises: breathe in, count to five, and then breathe out. Do this at least five times a day as you also relax your body muscles. Make sure you stay relaxed when you are studying. If you begin to feel tense, repeat the exercise. Your memory capacity can increase up to 50 % if you maintain an attitude of "relaxed attention".

3.- Exploratory reading:
Begin by familiarizing yourself with the text by first assessing the length of the chapter, reading titles, charts, bold text, and so on. Try to determine what the structure of the book is (text structures are explained in detail below) and then establish how much time it will take you to read and study it. Remember: be realistic in your assessment of time. If you set up goals that are impossible to fulfill, you will be discouraged.

4.- Make questions:
Jot down and answer questions (whether in writing or in a chart) about what you already know about the text or about what you can learn by reading the text. This exercise will prepare you better to associate the new concepts you will acquire with those you already have in your mind. Maintaining clear reading and study objectives will increase your memory capacity as well.

5.- Analytic reading:
Once you have done an exploratory reading of the text, read paragraph by paragraph classifying them according to their degree of difficulty and assimilation. If a paragraph has been easy to understand write an exclamation mark ( ! ) on its margin; if you have understood it evenly but it seems a little dense, write an "S" on its margin. Finally, if you have not understood what you have read because the paragraph is too complex, write instead a question mark ( ? ) on the margin.

Once you have classified all the paragraphs in the chapter, approach the text again in the following way: First, read all the "s" paragraphs, and then read all the ? paragraphs: you will realize than now all the ? paragraphs do not seem as difficult or complex as they did before. You will wonder how you did not understand them in your first reading.

6.- Assimilation reading:
Reread everything and write an asterisk ( * ) on the margin of more relevant paragraphs; write "V" in those paragraphs in which you have encountered new terms and vocabulary (it is always easier to remember a word in its context than to underline it). When you underline a text, you are preparing it for memorization, not for assimilation and understanding. Underlining makes you waste time by forcing you to reread lines mechanically and thoughtlessly.

7.- Draw up a summary-chart:
Focus on organizing ideas, concepts, and formulas in chart form. This will give you the basic structure for the table of contents you will have in the first pages of your report.

8.- Apply what you learn in your daily life:
Comment, practice, and develop what you have learned. Integrate those ideas to your knowledge.

9.- Review all your summaries before going to bed:
Remember that serotonin is released in produced in higher amounts during sleep; i.e. you will assimilate concepts better before going to bed.

How to understand a text?

When you want to remember or understand what you have read, but you cannot pinpoint exactly what is it that you want to retrieve or assimilate, the best thing is to try to determine the structure or organization of the information in the text. Unless you are motivated by a particular purpose or a "crave for knowledge", you will easily fall into the old habit of reading from left to right without stopping. By reading this way, you end up with a cluster of disorganized ideas. This can be extremely pleasurable if you are reading for pleasure; but if you are reading with the purpose of comprehending and remembering concepts to apply them to real-life situations, you need to organize ideas and concepts in a structured way. The best way to approach a text is to identify the structure and type of text you will be working with. Besides, in order to develop and present your project or thesis correctly, it is important that you learn how to develop the topic with the right structures.

Is all the information contained in a text organized in a logical way? Of course not!

There are bad writers, disorganized authors, and inefficient editors. If you come a cross a text written by somebody with these characteristics, you might be forced to rewrite the information in your mind to be able to remember and apply it later on. In contrast, All BIU textbooks are supervised by the members of the academic board and the Department of Psychopedagogy to make sure that they are truly functional, practical, and useful to the student. When you begin studying and reading, it is important that you develop you own criteria.

All texts are usually organized in one of the following 5 structures:

1.- Problem / Solution structure.
Problem: I need more money.
Effects: Expenses are higher than my income. Bankruptcy is imminent.
Causes: Unemployment.
Solution: Find a job, steal, enlist in the army...

2.- Opinion structure.
Opinion: Our next president should be a woman.
Reasons: Women are better managers, they are less inclined to begin a war, and are more sympathetic with other people.
Conclusion: I should vote for the feminine candidate.

3.- Thesis structure.
Thesis: Alcoholism is caused by a metabolic imbalance.
Evidence: Recent laboratory experiments.
Conclusion: Saliva tests in children could prevent alcoholism in adults.

4.- Information structure.
First aspect: description and location of the Easter Island.
Second aspect: Latest results of exploration.
Third aspect: Current population.
Fourth aspect: etc, etc...

5.- Instructions structure.
First step: Place an egg in a container filled with cold water.
Second step: Put the container on the stove.
Third step: Bring to a boil.
The different sides of understanding:

Describe: To explain the characteristics of a concept, idea...
Define: To abstract its main elements.
Classify: To identify the different categories, groups, and subgroups a said concept,idea, or object belongs to.
Compare: To discover similarities and differences between two things or among a series of things.
Induce: To establish a general rule by studying specifics.
Deduce: To arrive at conclusions based on initial premises after carrying out a series of logical operations.
Analyze: To separate the different elements that make up a structure.
Synthesize: To extract the most elemental aspects of a whole, and, in general, to understand the different relationships that exist among things; i.e. "be a part of," "depend on," "be casued by," etc, etc.
About the books assigned on BIU programs:

The organization of the academic program consists of textbooks specifically selected and adapted to the student's needs. The order in which these books are assigned to the student follows a complementary and dialectal structure.

The complementary order establishes a progressive in-depth knowledge.
The dialectical order presents different approaches of the study of the discipline so that the student has access to a complete and comprehensive framework.
The BIU Distance Learning System leads the student to a private and personal learning experience. What is assessed is the student's thinking process and not the memorization of data. The writing of reports, not sketches, respecting the limited number of pages compel students to process and reprocess the information in order to meet the format requirements.