Pathways to Effective College Reading

Why do some college students become bored or sleepy while they read?
What will help them to stay focused while they read?
What do they need to do to better understand what they read?
How will they enjoy what they read?
What will help them to better understand what is given, what is asked, and the best response to a question or direction on a test or an assigned task?

This book, Pathways to Effective College Reading (2nd ed.) addresses these questions through the following features.

1. Strategies are explained and demonstrated in various reading materials that enable students to read closely, critically, and effectively to acquire the skills that are necessary to stay focused and better understand and enjoy what they read.

2. Skills include figuring out the meanings of unfamiliar words, sensing relationships between sentences, following a smooth flow of ideas between paragraphs, recognizing the main idea and its supporting details, identifying paragraph structures or arrangements, outlining, summarizing, making inferences, distinguishing the difference between a fact and an opinion, recognizing the writer’s purpose and tone, and identifying a good argument in different types of reading materials.

3. Reading materials of varying degrees of difficulty and levels of interest include fiction as well as nonfiction such as general information, psychology, sociology, health, sports, nutrition, history, geology, physical fitness, sustainability, economics, marketing, and other course-content texts.

Students and faculty found the 1st edition of Pathways to Effective College Reading very helpful. This book helped students to improve their test-taking and critical thinking skills. Students who used this book improved their reading comprehension and performed better on a standardized test than those who used other books.