In 5th grade, way back in the 80s, my school had a mini-course in skimming that we took for a few weeks. They taught various techniques and the tests were pretty cool: here's 30 pages of text, you have 10 minutes to skim, and now here's a multiple-choice test about the material. Super practical skill and I see nothing like it in my own kids' curriculum. The big lesson was there being more than one way to consume text via reading.
I remember there being several drills on "scanning," which they defined as looking for a word or phrase on a page. I got very quick at that with practice, and those drills have helped me be able to flip back and forth in books. I can quickly scan a page to find and refer to a paragraph I sort of recall but don't really remember. And interestingly, I find it extremely difficult to do the same in eBooks. e.g., my brain is saying, "Go find the short paragraph near the top of the right page, early in the book, that has a bunch of acronyms in it"... and it's impossible to do in an ebook.
