Grad15 Presents: Critical Reading Strategies

As graduate students, we know that sometimes it feels like you are reading constantly. We’ve all been there: we’re reading an article or chapter, our minds start to drift, and suddenly we realize we’ve read three paragraphs but can’t recall any of it.

In this month’s Grad15 mini-webinar, we invited Lisa Cahill, Associate Director of the University Academic Success Programs and Graduate Writing Center, to share some strategies and resources to help you become a better critical reader and  to maximize your reading and researching capacities.

To become a strong critical reader, Lisa shared, it’s important to consider reading as a process. Rather than passively absorbing information, critical readers develop a pattern of reading, absorbing, and integrating material, constantly considering not only what is being presented, but how it fits into our research and what further questions it generates. Critical reading is part of a larger recursive research process-- for every source we read, we have to consider not only what it contributes to our understanding of the topic, but how it shifts (or completes) our understanding of research we’ve already done.

To learn more about strategies you can take to engage a text more critically, as well as resources available to help you compile and organize the information you’ve gleaned from your reading, download the slide deck or view a recording of this Grad15 session on the GradConnect Canvas resource hub. GradConnect is available to all ASU graduate students, faculty and staff; for first-time visitors, self-enrollment is required.

Grad15 is a mini-webinar series around graduate student professional development, support and resources. See all professional development events on the Graduate College’s Professional Development website.