I'm going to take some time to touch base on how to read an academic article. Please note that these tips are specific to my courses; if you are reading this blog post from another course or another institution, your professor may have other thoughts as to what they would like you to glean from the readings they assign.
This is specifically aimed toward reading empirical studies, which are studies that have a Method section and a results section that examine data quantitatively, or using statistics. Qualitative studies (that is, descriptive studies) and white papers (which are laying out a theory as opposed to presenting data) are different and are, in my opinion, a little bit easier to read for the non-statistician.
One of the many reasons why I prefer for you to read articles instead of textbooks is that I want you to see what's happening out in the world and relate that to your own experience. This being said, the most important parts of the article for my theory courses (research courses are a different story!) are the literature review and the discussion section.
The abstract is a quick summary of the article -- since you will be reading the article anyway, this is something you can skip for the time being.
I suggest you start with the literature review. The purpose of the lit review is to summarize what has already been done in relation to the theme, research question, and hypothesis of the article. Hopefully the authors have done a good job of capturing the big themes and the relevant research. Underline words you don't know -- this is completely normal. Unless you are a wizard in academia, these articles will use words that you are unfamiliar with. Don't beat yourself up if you have a hard time understanding a sentence or two -- make a mark next to it, keep reading, and see if you can grasp the meaning from context clues.
Remember -- you can always ask in class what something means. If you didn't understand it, chances are very high that other people didn't understand it as well. This is a learning process, and there is no shame in your not-knowing game.
The end of the lit review should contain the research questions for the study (which the lit review justifies) and the hypotheses, which should be directly related to those research questions.
Next, in the Method section, see if you can get an idea of who the sample was -- age range, sex and/or gender, location of the sample, racial and/or ethnic breakdown. You don't need to memorize this, but it's a good thing to put in the back of your head as you try to get a good idea of what the results of the study mean. If you'd like to read through the measures described in the Method section, go for it! Again, though, don't beat yourself up if you start to find this section confusing.
The Results section is going to be the hardest to read. You are most likely not a statistician, and the description of the tests and the outcomes might be on the difficult side. This is something that you may very well want to gloss over and head on down to the Discussion section.
The Discussion section begins with a one paragraph overview of the study. This is a great reminder of what it is the authors were looking for in the first place. Following this will be an overview of the results. It won't be nearly as technical as the Results section, which also means you won't have as much detail. However, for the non-statistician, it's much more clear to read. Also in this area you will have some interpretation of the results, put into the context of the lit review at the beginning of the paper. This section is important to read.
At the end of it is often (but not always!) a conclusion section. This comes after the limitations (there are always limitations to a study -- no study is perfect) and the future directions (because we always have more to learn!). This is a great place to be reminded about everything you just read put into one succinct paragraph.
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