How to get students to highlight academic text more effectively? When I give students readings (articles, textbooks, etc), they sometimes literally come to class with entire pages colored yellow with a highlighter. I cannot begin to understand how they discern that everything on a page is of equal value to know. 

As such, I would like to know of some suggestions for how to teach my student how to approach highlighting academic texts effectively.
Don't.

Dunlosky, John, et al. "What works, what doesn't." Scientific American Mind 24.4 (2013): 46-53. -- What Doesn't Work:


  HIGHLIGHTING
  
  Students commonly report underlining, highlighting or otherwise
  marking material. It is simple and quick — but it does little to
  improve performance. In controlled studies, highlighting has failed to
  help U.S. Air Force basic trainees, children and remedial students, as
  well as typical undergraduates. Underlining was ineffective regardless
  of text length and topic, whether it was aerodynamics, ancient Greek
  schools or Tanzania.
  
  In fact, it may actually hurt performance on some higher-level tasks.
  One study of education majors found that underlining reduced their
  ability to draw inferences from a history textbook. It may be that
  underlining draws attention to individual items rather than to
  connections across items.
  
  WHAT YOU SHOULD DO INSTEAD:  Highlighting or underlining can be useful
  if it is the beginning of a journey — if the marked information is
  then turned into flash cards or self-tests. Given that students are
  very likely to continue to use this popular technique, future research
  should be aimed at teaching students how to highlight more
  effectively—which likely means doing it more judiciously (most
  undergraduates overmark texts) and putting that information to work
  with a more useful learning technique.