Reading Skills Expected of College Students

We discussed the skills that are expected of students who are entering college, and we examined a list of expectations that was developed by a board of teachers and professors in California. Even if you go to school in another state, these are the skills that college professors will expect to see in you. More importantly, these are the skills that you need to be a good reader. They are worth developing. We will be talking about them all year:

• Read texts of complexity without instruction and guidance
• Summarize information
• Relate prior knowledge and experience to new information
• Make connections to related topics or information
• Synthesize information in discussion and written assignments
• Argue with the text
• Determine major and subordinate ideas in passages
• Anticipate where an argument or narrative is heading
• Suspend information while searching for answers to self-generated questions
• Identify the main idea
• Retain the information read
• Identify appeals to the reader
• Identify the evidence that supports, confutes or contradicts a thesis
• Read with awareness of self and others