One of the classic and most common strategies for accelerating learning that’s often taken for granted is note taking. It’s interesting to note that the mere act of taking notes – even if we don’t review the notes afterwards – already increases our learning because doing so involves active listening, focusing attention on the topic, sifting through important and unimportant points and ideas, utilizing visual and auditory channels while writing and summarizing points and ideas. That shouldn’t mean, however, that we shouldn’t review the notes we wrote down. When we go through them afterwards, our learning is even more enhanced, especially if we process them further by summarizing them or making an abstract.
Although taking notes seem to be quite a simple and basic activity, we can do it in a way that it helps maximize our learning experience. It isn’t science, that’s for sure, as it’s more of an art. But there is a method to it too. One important key to effective note taking is being able to write down enough notes for understanding the important points and ideas.
If our notes are too few, it may not be enough for us to understand the important ideas and points come review time. Further, if we simply copy verbatim the instructor or presenter’s bullet points, chances are high that we’ll have a very hard time processing them later on during the review.
Take for example, these notes taken by an imaginary student in an imaginary class:
Can you actually make sense of these notes? I don’t think so, right? Right! On the other hand, notes are supposed to be just that – notes. We don’t have to write everything down because doing so would keep us from understanding what the presenters discussing, particularly the important details. So we need to strike a balance – a sweet spot so to speak – in terms of writing to much or too little notes for effective learning.
Here are some useful tips to do that:
● Write down key ideas, conclusions and central ideas;
● Note the presenter’s statements preceded by emphasis statements such as “The point is”, “In summary” or “More importantly”, among others.
● Limit examples to just one and don’t include in your notes digressions, off topic statements, jokes and stuff that you know you can easily research by yourself.
● Also note down sets of related ideas such as before-and-after, cause and effect and process steps.
● Annotate your notes using symbols for quicker notations such as asterisks (for important points), exclamation points (controversial or contestable points), + signs (multiple points working together) and arrows (time sequence or cause-and-effect relationships).
