One of the most important abilities to be successful in college is to have excellent reading comprehension skills. There are many resources on the web to help you improve your skills in general and we present a few links below to do so. In addition managing your time, called "TIME MANAGEMENT" is a key to success in all fields of endeavor. We present some links below to help you improve your time management.

A comprehensive website at Virginia Tech presents many ideas on improving and perfecting your study skills

found at:   Study Skills Self Help Information

Reading in Astronomy:

Learning science (all of them) by reading a textbook or working a laboratory manual exercise requires a logical approach since the material is normally written in a serial manner. A serial manner means that the logic is step by step. This means it is important to understand a sentence before proceeding to the next sentence. Hence, one cannot read science like a novel. If one wants to read with comprehension it is important to read and learn the material one step at a time. The links below will help you improve your skills for this science class and for other types of reading.

Some things to keep in mind in this course:

In the laboratory it is especially true to read one sentence at a time and comprehend them. If you do not then ask for help before proceeding. ONE OF THE WORST THINGS TO DO in the laboratory is skip pages since each page mostly depends upon what happened before. Reading the textbook page by page with comprehension is the key to doing well on the Homework Assignments( refer to the improvement links below). One of the reading skills for comprehension which is useful for your textbook or laboratory assignments is "pre-reading" material( see the links below for details on what to look for when "pre-reading").  If you do not understand some material then seek help via our tutor program, your instructor and especially on the  Mastering Astronomy website go to the "STUDY AREA" areas and run the "SELF-GUIDED TUTORIAL" for each chapter your are studying.

By taking the time to improve your reading comprehension and time management skills you will be learning a process that will benefit you for the rest of your life in all fields of endeavor.. Good luck Prof Robbins

Some  WEB links:

IMPROVING YOUR READING COMPREHENSION( search the web for more sites if you need to)

IMPROVING TIME MANAGEMENT