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The whole point of studying is to retain information you’ll need later in life, even if it’s just for an impending test on a subject you may never think about again in the future. That’s not easy when you’re taking in a bunch of unfamiliar phrases and concepts—which is why you need a quality method to structure your study sessions. Try the SQ3R technique next time you’re studying, and see the difference it can make.
What is the SQ3R study method?
I touched on a similar method briefly before when advising on best note-taking practices, but SQ3R has applications well beyond the moments when you’re taking notes in (and after) class. It’s actually a reading comprehension technique that was first introduced in 1946 by Francis P. Robinson in his book Effective Study. (Fun side note: The “P” stands for Pleasant!)
SQ3R has withstood the test of time and is now widely recommended by academic counselors on campuses across the country. It’s named for the five steps involved in the method:
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Survey
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Question
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Read
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Recite
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Review
How does SQ3R work?
It’s important, first of all, to chunk up your work here. The goal is not to do this with an entire textbook or a bunch of materials, but to go chapter by chapter or section by section. You’ll see why as you move through the steps, but just bear in mind you want to be hyper-focused on smaller sections. In general, chunking up your review work is a recommended practice and it works well with SQ3R and all kinds of other study approaches, so be sure to brush up on it while you’re restructuring your study approach.
Survey
You survey your materials first, skimming them just enough to grasp what the overall idea is. Look at the chapter title, intros and conclusions, headings, sub-headings, graphics, tables, and summaries, but don’t read the whole thing.
You can also call on contextual details here. If you got assigned to read this chapter in a lecture, think back on that class, especially on anything the teacher mentioned as being important. Go through any slideshows they uploaded as supplemental material, as well as any existing notes you have. Again, just skim, but get an idea of what, broadly, this section is about.
Question
Then, you come up with questions, like, “What is this section about?” or, “How will I use this information in real life?” The questions can be more specific than that and depend a lot on what the content of your chapter is.
An easy trick is to turn subheadings into questions. If your subheading just says, “The assassination of Franz Ferdinand,” your question can be, “What were the immediate impacts of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand?”
Something I like to do is ask myself, “How might this appear on a test?” If I’m reading about the founder of a movement, for instance, and they were born in a certain country in a particular year and those details were relevant to their rise to power, I’d assume there would be a question on that on the test, so I might be able to focus my studying better if I can anticipate that.
Read
Jot the questions down before moving on to the third step, which is finally reading the whole chapter or section, paying attention to anything that might answer your questions. Take notes.
What helps here is writing the answers you find in the material directly under the questions you wrote down. Typically, I advocate for taking handwritten notes and studying with a pen and paper whenever possible, but here, you may find that you don’t have enough room to answer the questions you write down or take notes on new information you find while reading. To be on the safe side (and stop yourself from making a disorganized, scribbled-out and erased-up mess) go ahead and use a word processing document for your questions and answers.
Recitation
The next step is recitation. Use your own words to explain the contents of what you studied and answer your own questions. Pretend you’re explaining it to someone else or even write it all down in a small essay format.
If you write it all down as a small essay, you’ll be using the “blurting” method, or at least a variation of it. Blurting asks you to remember everything you can about a topic, then say or write it somewhere before checking your notes and materials for anything you missed. It forces active recall, or the act of digging something out of your memory. Here, don’t feel too much pressure to remember everything; treat this more like an open-book test, especially if it’s your first time through your review. You can use other techniques, like the Leitner flashcard method, to entrench the answers you find in your memory once you’ve got a grasp of the overall theme of the section.
You can also go a step further and actually explain the material to someone. That’s the Feynman method, which has you act like a teacher describing the content to someone who knows nothing about it. You can do this with a parent, a friend, or even ChatGPT. It helps you break the material down into easy-to-understand parts. If you don’t understand something well enough to teach it to someone else, you don’t understand it well at all. But again, incorporate this over time. You don’t need to be ready for this step on your first run-through with SQ3R. It’s just an easy way to gauge how well you’re mastering a concept.
Review
Finally, review what you read, wrote, and/or said before starting the process again on another chapter. Feel free to move to another chapter or section before you have a firm grasp of the current one, too. Called interleaving, this practice of studying multiple concepts or ideas at once can force you to make connections between material and better understand both topics than if you were tackling them individually.
The purpose of all of this is to get you thinking critically and help you stay engaged as you read, hunting for the answers to your questions. From there, you can branch off into the other techniques I mentioned, like Leitner and Feynman, because you created a solid base of chunks of information—questions and answers from the text, essentially—to study.
Best practices with SQ3R
I mentioned earlier that you might want to use a word processor or notes app for this, so you don’t run out of space or get frustrated. You do have other options if handwriting and its benefits appeal to you. In that case, I recommend picking up a SQ3R notebook. It’s only $6, and it provides designated spaces for the different steps; plus, since the sections are pre-defined, it forces you to take on your work in smaller chunks because you don’t have room on the page to try to do too much at once. Play around with different methods, from digital to notebook, to see what works for you and the material you study.
Finally, don’t assume you’ve reached the end of studying when you hit the review portion of SQ3R. Studying is a long-term endeavor, so that “review” part is actually ongoing from the time you first get acquainted with the material. After you finish your first round of SQ3R, study the materials periodically, every few days. If, after a few reviews, you feel like you’re not grasping the material as well as you want to, try the SQ3R method again on the same chunk of text you already did, formulating different questions and looking for other angles. Once you’re more familiar with the topics, you’ll come up with more in-depth questions, so repeating SQ3R a few times over a semester is a smart strategy.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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