There are a variety of different strategies that an individual can use to read a particular piece of material, but it is important for an individual to find the best strategy for the type of resource that the individual is using. There are a wide range of different written materials that an individual may have to use in order to study for an exam, interview, or other similar purpose and each type of written material requires a different reading strategy in order to use that resource in the most effective way possible. One of the strategies that an individual can use to read and study a variety of different material is known as Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review (SQ3R.) This reading strategy is primarily intended for studying information that does not necessarily confuse the individual, but rather is just unfamiliar to the individual. In other words, SQ3R is usually used for textbooks that an individual is reading for the first time so the individual knows that he or she will probably need to know the material that the textbook covers at some point, but he or she may not know exactly which material is important.
SQ3R consists of five separate steps that help the individual determine the most important points of each chapter and study those points. First, the individual should just quickly survey the chapter for titles, headings, subheadings, review questions, captions, chapter or section summaries, and any other easily identifiable indications of the key points that the chapter is attempting to convey. Next, the individual should take each of these items and turn them into questions that the individual can answer while he or she is reading the chapter. Once the individual has identified all of the questions that he or she should answer while reading the chapter, the individual should then read the chapter and try to find the answers to each of the questions. Each time that the individual completes a paragraph or section of the chapter, that individual should stop, recite any questions that the individual believes he or she can answer and then recite the answers to those questions. Finally, once the individual has read the entire chapter and answered all of the questions, he or she should go back and write down each question right next to its corresponding answer. This will allow the individual to review the information at a later time very quickly.