This guest post was written by Dr Conner McAleese (ASC Tutor and PhD English)
For most subjects, exam revision will involve reading. This could include re-reading your own lecture notes as well as engaging with new secondary sources. Simply reading notes or papers, however, can easily become a passive form of revision that only wastes time and doesn’t help you learn. To make your revision more active, a structure like the SQ3R method will help you critically engage with your reading and thoroughly engage with your sources.
While the SQ3R Method is intended as a note taking method, it also introduces a valuable set of skills that can help with reading your own notes, and, equally as importantly, engaging with secondary material during exam revision. It can seem quite complicated at first, but with practice it will become much easier to build into your exam (and overall study!) routines.
A TOP TIP throughout using the SQ3R method is to constantly refer back to the author in your thinking! Hurdy McGurdy says… Alanis Morrisette says… This will help build the author’s name into your understanding of the secondary source which is a nice touch for including within your exam!
The SQ3R method consists of five stages: Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
Survey
Survey means exactly what it says on the tin – survey the landscape of your source. This means taking note of a few things before you even begin to read. For instance, is this a book chapter? A monograph? A journal article? Each of these sources will come with a different set of challenges to reading them.
Your next step is to survey your source’s structure. What are its headings? Subheadings? Does the source contain figures? Tables? Pictures? The most important aspect of structure for the SQ3R method is to see if your source contains any summaries (such as an abstract at the start). If it does, this may help guide your reading as you can cherry pick which sections you feel would be best for you.
This leads to the last aspect of surveying a text – why are you reading it? How does this source connect to your wider study plan? You can consider what arguments the author makes and whether or not you agree with them.
Remember: While you won’t know what exam questions will come up, you can (and should!) build arguments in your head around your subject’s topic matter. This can aid with memorisation of the materials themselves.
Question
Once you have surveyed your secondary source, it’s time to interrogate it. Be critical here. Before you begin reading, ask yourself some questions about the source. What does it mean by this subheading? Why does it choose to include this section at all? Hopefully, all your questions will be answered as your read your text. If not, then that is a question you could try and answer yourself (is the source incomplete?).
TOP TIP: If your school and/or discipline provides past examples of exams, it’s helpful to use those questions to guide your reading. You can also create your own practice questions by using the source itself. Take a look at the big ideas outlined in the abstract or introduction and draft some questions based on the question the source itself is trying to answer.
Read
By this point, it’s time to start reading! The key thing, though, is that the survey and question stages mean you know how the source is structured, so you may not have to read the whole thing. For instance, if your survey identified subheadings which aren’t relevant to your specific module exam (remember: the scholar has not written their text to align with the module’s Intended Learning Outcomes!), you can just ignore those sections.
When reading the sections you do think will be of value, keep your questions in mind. You may have drawn up questions for specific subheadings during the Question phase of this method – use them. As you read, try and find the answer to those questions. This will trick your brain into retaining more information! Work smarter, not harder.
A TOP TIP for this step is to make sure to read actively and critically. You should use methods like note-taking and annotation to keep you focussed, and be sure to ask questions (and answer your original questions!) as you go.
Recite
In this step, you write the answers to the questions you asked in step two in your own words. Once your reading stage is complete, immediately write down the answers to the questions you set yourself. You can do this after each subheading if you wish! When constructing your answers to your questions, try and make them accessible to someone who is not familiar with your subject area. A great way to tell if you truly know something is to try to explain something to a non-expert (perhaps a family member or friend). The more simply you can explain it (and it still makes sense!), the better you understand the material.
If you’re reading a secondary source for this method, it would be worth adding to the notes you have already taken for your classes for this subject. In a similar way to your note-taking style for lectures and seminars, now write concise summaries of what you have read and learned. And keep using the author’s name at this stage, too! This makes the next stage of the method much easier to complete.
Review
This stage is crucial. Now is the time to see how much you have learned!
So, return to your questions. Read your questions aloud and see if you can answer your questions effectively without re-reading your summaries. If you cannot answer those questions straight away – do not panic! It is not expected that you should be able to do this perfectly on your first attempt.
Once you feel confident that you can answer each of your questions without looking at your notes, try and summarise the author’s main points without looking at anything you’ve written. This is key, especially if your exam is closed book! Remember the tip above about including the author’s name in your questions and reciting? Continue doing so. Hopefully, after a few run throughs of these steps, you will be able to describe, explain, and summarise McGurdy’s and Morissette’s arguments with ease!
Conclusion
A really important part of this process is to be self-reflective. Do not ignore any gaps in your knowledge as you go along. Honesty, especially with yourself, is important during any exam revision period. If you don’t know something, say so! Acknowledging what you don’t yet know will help reframe your mind so that you can fill those gaps in your knowledge before the exam begins.
If you want to take your learning further, you can build on what you’ve done here by using the SPE Method, too!
