Read only summaries, not chapters – you’ll learn more

Students learn more from summaries than entire chapters – research on summaries confirms

“In a series of experiments, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University compared five-thousand-word chapters from college textbooks with one-thousand-word summaries of those chapters. The textbooks varied in subject: Russian history, African geography, macroeconomics. But the subject made no difference: in all cases, the summaries worked better. When students were given the same amount of the time with each – twenty to thirty minutes – they learned more from the summaries than they did from the chapters. This was true whether the students were tested twenty minutes after they read the material or one year later. In either case, those who read the summaries recalled more than those who read the chapters.” from Errornomics, Why we make mistakes and what we can do to avoid them by Joseph Hallinan

Good summaries are short – like miniskirts – short enough to retain the interest but long enough to cover the subject.

We’ve been saying that for some time now – just download the FREE summary of 37 Speed Reading Techniques

Speed read about the importance of reading summaries (spd rdng technique #26) for getting overview firsts

Read the best book summaries

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