CRCB Chapter 14: Internet Resources

Evaluating internet info helps determine if they are reliable and useful. Knowing how to critically evaluate internet material helps you become a better student and will help your life beyond college. You need to be an "open-minded skeptic" by considering each websites relevancy, reliability, credibility, and accuracy using these steps: 1) know your purpose 2) double-check facts 3) consider the source 4) evaluate content 5) determine intended audience 6) evaluate writing 7) use what you already know.

CRCB Chapter 13: Reading Beyond the Words

Critical reading comprehension involves challenging yourself to understand what you read in different levels of complexity. Bloom's taxonomy has 6 levels of critical thinking: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation. By creating and answering questions at each of those levels, you will better able to predict questions the instructor will ask on an exam and be prepared to answer them.

CRCB Chapter 12: Identifying and Evaluating Arguments

Recognizing arguments as you read lets you critically examine an author's reasoning. Arguments always have at least one reason and one conclusion. Two types of arguments are deductive and inductive. Deductive arguments have at least one premise that leads to a conclusion. Inductive arguments begin with a series of specific observations and conclude with a generalization that flows from them. Try to always question an author's views so flaws are not so easily accepted. Being able to detect and evaluate arguments in textbooks and reading materials forces you to analyze the logic of what you read and helps you present your own ideas in a logical fashion.

CRCB Chapter 11: Reading, Understanding & Creating Visual Aids

Textbook authors use visual aids to help readers understand the info they are presenting. Visual aids reinforces and supplements reading material. Different types of visual aids incluse charts, graphs, drawings, photos, mindmaps and outlines. The type of visual aid you use depends on the material they will illustrate. Creating visual aids is an effective way of studying. It helps to recognize the important elements you are reading and prioritize and organize them in a useful format. You can't make a good visual aid if you don't know the material.

CRCB Chapter 10: Textbook Marking

Textbook marking is a systematic mark and label tool that helps you distinguish important ideas from less important ones. Mark and label main idea, important details, new vocab in your textbook chapters. Use experience in lecture and lab to decide of you should mark more. Always mark info that is unclear and go back to check it. A personalized system will work as long as it is consistent and makes sense to you and achieves the main goal of textbook marking: showing relationships between ideas in what you read.

CRCB Chapter 9: Using Preview, Study Read and Review (PSR) Strategies

The "PSR" technique requires that you question yourself before, during and after you read. It encourages you to participate in a reader-author conversation rather than just reading passively. You asses what an author is telling you and decide if it makes sense. Add to what you know by recalling related info. This active participation helps us understand and remember textbook material. The PSR technique requires us to write in our learning journal. By commenting in writing helps us digest an authors ideas and articulate our own. By identifying where you got confused in a reading, you can return to that point and reread the relevant section. This will help us understand the material or alert us to ask for help from an instructor or classmate.

CRCB Chapter 8: Textbook Methods of Organization

Authors organize their info with certain patterns or methods. Being able to recognize methods of organization ie: listing, analysis, cause/effect, comparison/contrast, definition/example helps us understand the ideas in the textbook and how they are connected to each other. It will also help us remember what we read. A useful way to ID an author's method of organization is to look for word clues. OWC's indicate which pattern he/she is using. An author will often use more than one method from paragraph to paragraph, but have one overall method for each chapter.