Think back to your first year in college. If you were like me, it took a while to become economical with a highlighter. I remember being told that when I read my textbooks, I should highlight everything within the text that was important. But to me, everything was important. I didn't know how to be discriminating......to distinguish between what was worth coming back to and what wasn't. When I went back to review my text for a test or a paper, I was confronted with pages of yellow and pink.

    In an effort to survive, I forced myself to stop with the highlighter and pick up a pen. From now on, rather than highlight indiscriminately, I would only allow myself to underline something if I could explain in the margins why I was underlining. I may have thought an idea was important because it was an "a-ha", reminded me of something, or I had questions about it. Then, when I went back to review my text, instead of reading everything that was yellow and pink, I read my notes in the margins that were directly linked to underlined passages. My reading became much more active and I found I spent less time reading pages of text without understanding or remembering what I had just read.

    The ability to mark up a text is a gift we can give our students in every subject area. Asking kids to mark up will not only help them with their review later, but will force them to be active, not passive, readers. There are several ways to have students mark up. If a book is school property, you might give them sticky notes and ask them to place them within the text. If the text is a photocopied article or chapter, you can have them write directly in the text, or give them codes to place within the text. (See link below to code chart.)

    Click on the "articles" link below to read a short study describing the effects of teaching kids to study traditionally versus using text annotations.  Also, check out the marking up lesson plans that will help your students get headed down the right track.
                 ~Amy McCabe