Effective Notetaking (Study Skills)

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Best book notes:

“Being a successful student is far more about being a smart user of effective strategies than about being ‘smart’.”

“Note-taking is probably the most common study strategy. Everyone takes notes — not everyone knows how to do it well.”

“Note-taking is a strategy for making information meaningful”

“note-taking is effective to the extent that you paraphrase, organize and make sense of the information while taking notes2 — in other words, to the extent that you put the information in your own words.”

“Working memory governs your ability to comprehend what you are reading or hearing, your ability to learn new words, your ability to reason, your ability to plan and organize yourself, and much more.”

“Working memory capacity (the amount you can ‘hold’ in working memory) varies between people, and indeed, WMC correlates highly with fluid intelligence (fluid intelligence refers to general reasoning and problem-solving abilities, while crystallized intelligence refers to cognitive functions associated with knowledge).”

“The notes of students with a high working memory capacity were fuller, with more complex propositions, more main ideas, and more words.”

“working memory is that it can only hold around seven chunks of information (between 5 and 9).”

“Actually, the situation is even worse than that. Recent research is now converging on the idea that working memory can only hold four items, of which only one is in your ‘focus of attention’ at any one time.”

““working memory” is not a single entity. It contains several functions, including the “central executive” which coordinates and manages the various tasks needed.”

“Taking notes is only effective if the student has sufficient note-taking skill to deal with the learning material.”

“Note-taking is primarily a tool to encode information effectively in your memory.”

“Highlighting refers to any way of emphasizing key words or phrases, such as underlining, framing, using bold type, using a colored marker, etc.”

“For the most part, then, highlighting is only a useful strategy when the material is relatively simple. However, what constitutes ‘simple’ depends on your knowledge of a topic.”

“highlighting should be simple — using different methods (bolding, underlining, coloring text) to indicate different categories of information (such as key terms, examples, dates, key statements) doesn’t improve recall and may even harm it2”

“Headings have the same function as summaries — to emphasize topics and the organizational structure.”

“Headings usually, but not invariably, improve recall for the information they emphasize.”

“summarizing is the heart of note-taking.”

“taking notes is about putting things in your own words”

“Divide your text into passages of around 1500 words”

“Both outlines and graphic organizers are more effective than conventional notes.”

“Multimedia summaries are useful for cause-&-effect relationships.”

“Chunking: group the information into small, manageable chunks (let the constraints of working memory guide you)”

“It is important to make your notes ‘your own’; you don’t want to solely rely on teacher handouts.”

“Another possible strategy for reducing mindwandering is meditation. There’s some evidence14 that a brief (6 minutes) period of focused meditation before the lecture reduces mindwandering. The focused meditation simply involved closing one’s eyes and counting breaths.”

“Your memory is not a junk-heap (though it might seem like it sometimes!). Memory is a database. If you don’t understand how you’ve organized it, that’s because you haven’t taken conscious control of the process.”

“The more organized you are when encoding information, the more easily it will be remembered. An effective note-taking strategy helps you organize information.”

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