Reading skills (TART & Flash Card) by Jin

For this week, I as one of the students in CLS 105 course had tried to use some reading skills to develop my other course. What i used for my CFS 388 course was one was TART, and another was Flash Card. In fact, each reading skill has own advantages and right position, depending on in which class you are going to use the skills. There are some reasons that I chose the two different reading skills; TART and Flash Card.

First of all, TART. Before I used it, I looked up the meaning of the strategy. Basically, this word, TART, represents some different four words; Terms, Attend, Read, and Test. When I saw this explanation, I thought that it's just only what normal people usually do when they study, or do homework. However, as most people know about the importance of basic skills and the lowest solid foundation, I re-thought about it.

What I did for 'Terms' part on CFS 388 course at the first, I tried to find all the bold words, because those are well deeply explained by the writer, meaning those are significant. Next step, Attend! Absolutely I went to every course by figuring out the difference between the technical terminology in the textbook, and my professor. After attending the class, I read the chapters that professor went over during the course. I focused on understanding the words that I never heard or heard, but don't know. Last one that I did was testing myself. I created several questions for each chapter, and before the course test, I tried to answer as much as I could.

By having done this strategy, I could realize that TART as a reading skill has lead students to follow the most basic steps and allow them to study in detail. I was a kind of person who study briefly, and look up only bold cases, but after this work, I might be toward a systematic & scrupulous reading skill-user.

Flash Card reading skill was also used in CFS 388 course. Personally, I believe that it's very useful when people try to memorize professional words such as Vas deferens or Cremaster muscle. According to explanation from the textbook about Flash Card Reading, this strategy is most efficient for a text-dependent course. Although CFS 388 is basically based on the lecture, when we had a mid-term, my professor assigned us to study textbook because half of the questions would come from it.

First step I did for this strategy was skimming or reading

thorough whole chapters to find out where the necessary information is located. After that, I began to read section by section. It took pretty much long time to summarize the important sources. I wrote an explanation of certain word on one side, and the word on the other. When I put the word on the flash card, also put a page number to find it later more easily. For the last step, left thing is only taking myself with the flash cards that I put the words and meanings. However, I didn't make 5 questions on the back of each card although I had a test, because I wanted to focus on only the words.

As I went through these steps, it was not that difficult to study and memorize the hard-meaning words. Even though those are still difficult to fully understand, now I can feel that it's much easier, also comfortable.

Before I put a period on this post, I would like to say 'Thanks' to Dr. Blumin to enable me to experience these useful reading skills. Both TART and Flash Card reading are very efficient ways of reading.