Executive Learning: Successful Strategies for College Reading and Studying

Rating:
Summary: useful reading companion to other reading strategy books!
Review: From my personal perspective, I think this book will serve as an useful reading companion to the other reading strategy books I have reviewed so far.

As the author contends, the primary objective of this book is to help you become an independent, strategic and effective learner in your college studies.

In a nutshell, her substantial content is arranged in three stages as follows:

Introduction:
- getting to know yourself;
- getting to know your textbooks;
- getting to know your instructors;

Empowerment:
- taking notes from college textbooks;
- identifying & learning new words;
- comprehending textual material;
- extracting key information;
- recoding key information;
- preparing for & taking college level test;
- beoming a critical readers;

Refinement (with study guides):
- sample chapter from Psychology;
- sample chapter from Biology;
- sample chapter from History;
- sample chapter from Music;

Although she has provided with a bank of powerful reading & study strategies for reading comprehension, vocabulary, note taking & test taking in the empowerment stage of the book, I feel she should have also provided more reading samples & study guides from the other disciplines in her refinement stage.

For beginners, I feel she has done a great job in her introduction stage by helping readers to get acquainted, at the onset, with themselves (Know Thyself, to paraphrase Socrates), their textbooks and even their instructors. This important stage can also serve as a goal setting & time management platform for students/readers.

For readers who want to learn how to do marginal notations or annotations in their textbooks, the author provides many excellent hands-on examples. In terms of information gathering from textbooks, this is a very important skill for college students to acquire.

The author's creative concepts of using FLIP and SCORE approaches in the reading processes are interesting, as opposed to the traditional SQ3R method...even though they share many similarities.

On the whole, I have enjoyed reading - and learning from this book. To sum up, this book can serve as a useful reading companion to:

Adam Robinson's What Smart Students Know;
Anne Dye Phillips/Peter Sotiriou's Steps to Reading Proficiency;
Eleanor Leo's Powerful Reading Efficient Reading;
Kathleen McWhorter's Academic Reading;
Dave Ellis' Becoming a Master Student;