Reading Skills
Professors often complain that high school graduates have reading skills that are too slow to succeed in college. College courses might each require from 60 to 180 pages of reading per week, and unfamiliar vocabulary or concepts can slow reading speeds dramatically. 
Professors give assignments like these because they have a lot of material to cover their subject matter. They know students will get more out of class lectures and discussions if they have read the material on the syllabus. Students procrastinate soon discover that they cannot follow what the professors and other students are talking about or they are on their way to a low, even failing grade.
Advantage Learning Center will teach you how to
- skim
- grasp the main topics
- read for details
- take notes and
- remember what you have read.
Reading Speed and Comprehension
One option I recommend for those who read slowly is speed reading software. When I first started tutoring SAT, I saw immediately that perhaps 25% of the students had problems reading all passages and/or answering all the questions. After the SAT was redesigned in 2016, slower readers had even more problems. The new SAT Reading section contains 5 passages, and some of the passages are from writers such as Dickens and John Adams. Students have 65 minutes to read the passages and answer 52 questions, and some slower readers wouldn’t get to all five passages or would guess at some answers. Slow reading is not only a problem in the SAT, it’s a symptom that the student will have problems with reading in college.
AceReader.com is a good solution for those in grade 3 to adult. (BTW, I am not being paid or compensated for this endorsement) I reviewed many reading software programs and discovered 10 years ago that this award-winning program was the best. Since then, it has been revised several times and is still the best program out there. It improves your speed and comprehension in two ways. It flashes words and phrases on the screen at faster and faster rates, and it also trains your eyes to move more quickly across the screen by reading larger and larger and larger chunks of texts. There are many levels and a wide variety of texts, and you can make a substantial improvement in comprehension and speed with about 15-20 minutes of practice 2 or 3 times a week. I’ve recommended this program to many students, and those who have tried and stuck with it have noticed a dramatic improvement in speed and comprehension.