Managing How You Study

Note Taking

Take notes when reading; take notes from course discussions; take notes from comments and announcements from the instructor; and take notes from summaries posted after class projects.

In other words – take notes on any course knowledge gained. When you take notes you become more involved in the course material. Taking notes will help you think critically and organize ideas. Your notes will help you study information and prepare for tests.

Review notes after each online session and every weekend.

The following basic strategies are generally suggested to help you monitor your comprehension of course material: note-taking, questioning, summarizing.

• Note-taking requires the learner to pay close attention to the text and develop, through notes, a meaningful interpretation of the text.
• When taking notes, the use of paraphrasing – rewriting in your own words –important information from the text also helps clarify its meaning.
• Note-taking creates the opportunity for you to think about the material you are reading, thereby increasing your ability to understand and remember its most important points.
• Develop questions about what you are reading.
• Self-generated questions increase your awareness of the learning process and your potential for success.
• Summarizing helps organize large quantities of information.
• Good summaries focus on the main point, identify major supporting points, and eliminate all unnecessary information.
• An effective summary:
  1. Requires unnecessary material to be ignored,
  2. Requires redundant or repeated points be deleted,
  3. Uses general statements to consolidate details,
  4. Is a compilation of important topic sentences,
  5. Requires the invention of topic sentences where necessary to focus on key information,
  6. Helps you to monitor your comprehension,
  7. Keeps you alert to important points, and
  8. Helps you to comprehend by requiring you to organize information in a meaningful way.

Key Points: Date and identify each page of your notes .Your notes provide material to help you study and to prepare for tests. When you take notes, you become more involved in the course material. Note taking helps you think critically and organize ideas. The information you learn online may not appear in any text; you will have no way to study it without writing it down.

• Read the assignment before going to the online lecture materials
• Record whatever an instructor emphasizes
• Leave blank spaces between points
• Draw pictures and diagrams that will illustrate ideas
• Indicate material that is important with a star, underlining or a highlighting marker, or use of capital letters
• Make your notes legible
• Consider that your notes are part, but not all, of what you need to learn
• Reviewing notes after each study session or at least before you go to bed, will help recall

NOTE: At the end of 9 weeks, those who reviewed their notes within a day recalled about 75% of the information. Those who did not review their notes were unable to recall even 50% of the information after one day and only a little more than 20% of the information after nine weeks.

Note Taking and Textbooks

Highlight only key points in your textbook or other course materials. Most texts have approximately 3 main points on a page. Write notes in the margin – brief one or two word comments – to use in reviewing what you have read. Put stars or exclamation points by designated important points. Rewording material you have read in an assignment will help fix that information in memory.

Note Taking and Online Materials

While taking an online course, note taking will take on a different format. There are several ways to accomplish it. First, you can copy and paste materials from the web page into a Word document. (Office XP has made this process easier.) Once the materials are in Word format, you can highlight the main items for study purposes. Second, you can print out the pages online and highlight the main points. Remember! Copying material for study purposes is allowed, however, copying and reusing materials is considered plagiarism and will result in severe consequences. This is true for any material copied online. To avoid this situation, make sure you are aware of your responsibilities.