In elementary school, many of us were taught to sight read, which promotes speed. For most people, the tendency is to try to get through a piece of written material as quickly as possible. When reading more complex material, however, this is not always the best option. College reading assignments are often more complex, and require a more intimate understanding of the text than the kind of plot and character recognition focused on in high schools. Therefore, adjust your speed to the difficulty of the material you are reading, and the complexity of the response you will be required to make. This may mean that it takes you significantly longer to get your homework done, but by focusing on understanding rather than simply getting through the material, you are sure to do better on the assignment than you would by rushing through it.
Unless you are reading more basic material, it is normal to come across more than one word with which you are unfamiliar; in high school it is common to learn to sound out such words, and figure out their definition based on context. While context almost always a clue to meaning, it is far more important when reading for college that you understand every word you read. Being able to pronounce such words is less important because the chance of them coming up in speech is slight. College reading almost always necessitates using the dictionary. You might also find that learning the history of a word offers new insight into the material.
Another important aspect of college reading is marking and interacting with your text. Though in high school, writing in books is usually forbidden because students do not own their texts, in college this is not the case. Marking a text in a way that facilitates understanding is known as annotation. Every person notes different aspects of an assignment, but there are a few things, like organization, important points and moments of contradiction to which it is always good to pay attention. Feel free to underline, highlight, circle and draw connections between passages as a way to reveal deeper aspects of the text. Annotation requires practice, but is a tool that can help with any college reading assignment.
Most people are in the habit of accepting words on a page at face value; a common assumption is that whatever the author writes must be true, because it has been published. In high school we are taught to read for basic understanding, but college requires a more complex approach towards written material. To read critically means reading between the lines, and considering both what has been written, and what has been left unsaid. Step back from the text and think about the author's role, as well as the topic's place in society. It is important to put any text in context with the critical conversation to which it is responding; put simply, this means that you need to know not just what has been written, but why and how it came to be.
Related to learning to read between the lines, learning to synthesize means thinking about material in a larger context. Most of the time when we read, we do it because we want to know the information, and be able to summarize the passage at a later date. While summarizing simply means putting the main ideas in your own words, synthesis requires responding to not just the text, but the topic itself. Synthesis is the ability to take multiple texts and explain how they are related to each other, and what the importance of this connection is.
The ultimate goal of most college reading assignments is to introduce students to the critical conversation, and synthesis skills give students the ability to enter into the conversation themselves, therefore contributing to their fields of study while still in school.