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Reviewing NotesYou may recall that the purpose for taking notes is to prepare a permanent record for later use in writing, thinking, and preparing for exams. It is with this latter purpose in mind that we now turn out attention to review strategies that in some way make use of the notes you have made from class or your texts. You have already begun to practice review strategies if you decided to use the Cornell Note-taking System or Mind Maps since they involve selecting key information, associating it with key words or phrases, and then elaborating on its meaning. The strategies listed below work in similarly active ways to assist you with learning your material thoroughly. Keep in mind that these strategies are thinking intensive and that at first they will take some time to work with. You might begin to feel a little frustrated at the "extra" time these strategies seem to take. Try to hand in there and work with the strategies a while so that they become a little more automatic. What you will likely find is that you become more proficient at these reviewing skills and that you end up saving time that previously might have been spent simply reading and rereading your notes. Constructing an outlinePerhaps the greatest difficulty you can face with your notes is to find that up to three quarters of the information you have written is not necessary. The process of note-taking is often at least partly concerned with actually comprehending the information. As a result, you may tend to take down details that assist you with understanding the main ideas, only to find later that the key word or phrase representing the main idea alone serves the purpose. A common practical approach to lengthy notes undertaken by students is to rewrite the notes into "study notes", notes typically composed of briefly written statements which captured only the main ideas necessary to recall your course information. And usually these notes were helpful in bringing together a whole term's work, especially because as you made them, you consolidated your information. Constructing and outline is not all that different from making those good old study notes. If you have been using the Cornell notes system, then you already have the raw materials for building an outline. Simply collect up all the key words and phrases and then structure them in a formal outline. A formal outline contains headings, sub-headings, detail points, examples, and so on arranged on a page with varying degrees of indentation to illustrate the relative position of the idea in the overall hierarchy of ideas in your course. The outline below should give you a brief idea of what we're on about. You'll see that the outline resembles a kind of table of contents like the ones you might commonly come across in your texts. And, the idea is the same -- you construct an outline when you have a lot of information to organize and when you want to see that information as an overview.
Principles of Effective Learning A. Motivated Interest (1)defining a purpose for learning (2)how memory is improved by motivated interest (i)attention (ii)concentration B. Selectivity (1)not selecting comes from a fear of failure (2)importance of choosing central information (i) syllabus (ii) course lectures and texts (iii) collaborating with fellow students C. Intention to Remember (1)must set purpose to remember (i) intending to remember vs. the osmosis model (ii) responsibility for using effective strategies (2)forgetting is effortless (i) Ebbinghaus forgetting curve D. Meaningful Organization (1)often students fail to organize (i) notes resemble lists of unrelated facts (2)memory is facilitated by organization (i) organization is related to comprehension (ii) comprehension is related to improved memory
Writing a summary paragraphAnother very helpful review strategy that you can engage in is to write a summary paragraph based on your notes. Ideally, you would write a summary paragraph from memory using the key words and phrases you chose from your notes. You would do this in such a way as defines the terms, relates them together, and links them to the rest of the course material. As well, you could consider how the ideas might be applied in either a "real world" context or in your discipline. Summary paragraphs work well as practice for short answer and essay style exams and can go a long way to getting you started writing towards an essay or report. Making personal examplesLecturers will often give a series of examples and illustrations for the main ideas they wish to emphasize. These examples will often take the form of experiments that support a hypothesis or theory or an anecdote that reveals how the idea is applied or manifests itself in real life. For the most part learning these examples will be helpful to you in your course -- you may even find a similar example used in a question on an exam or assignment. Sometimes, however, you may find that the example doesn't do a good job of explaining an idea for you or that an important idea from your course was not elaborated with an example. You are well advised, in such situations, to develop a personal example -- one that represents the ideas accurately but that also makes use of details that are familiar to you from your own context. You'll notice, if you look at the review column of the Cornell notes above that one of the entries is a question asking you for a personal example for motivated interest to replace the example about baseball. Incidentally, making a personal example is a good lie detector tests for you ability to understand the course material: if you can make an effective example, it is a sign that you likely understand you material well. Elaborative rehearsalElaborative rehearsal is simply a fancy way of linking related ideas together in such a way that when you think of one idea, the others come logically to mind. When you talk out or write out information to define or analyze a key word or phrase, you are engaging in elaborative rehearsal. In fact, writing summaries, choosing personal examples, and generating questions (see below) are all forms of elaborative rehearsal. The process involves you going over your material through a variety of modes of repetition (that's the rehearsal part) and defining terms, comparing and contrasting ideas, looking for relationships between ideas in your notes and themes in your course etc. (that's the elaborative part). The purpose and goal of elaborative rehearsal is to allow you practice recalling and communicating fluently (either through written or oral language) the ideas of your course. Whereas passive studying mostly involves reading and rereading material in an attempt to store it in memory, elaborative rehearsal practices the actual process you engage in during an exam -- that is, remembering. Generating questionsWhat do you mean generate questions? See you've got the hang of it already. This review strategy works well with the strategies listed above because it gets you to think about your material from another perspective -- the perspective of your instructor, to be exact (see King, 1992; Thorpe, 1992). Again, when you go into a test situation, you face a series of questions to which you must provide answers. This strategy can't guarantee you will predict the exact questions that you'll see on an exam, but it will get you thinking in the ways your professor intends you to be able to think about the course material. How? There you go again, asking questions. Essentially, it will be important to base your questions on the key words and phrases you've chosen from your notes and to ask questions at different levels of thinking. This latter point is perhaps where you'll be in new territory. You are probably well accustomed to asking the most fundamental questions -- definition or summary questions. They begin with "What is the meaning of ....?" or "The basic idea of .... is......". These question frames are easily filled with content words from your courses and can serve very easily to get you started asking yourself questions. In addition to definition and summary questions are analytical questions such as "What are the key aspects of .....?" and "How does.....relate or compare to ....?" These analysis questions move you to a deeper level of understanding of your material. Finally, there are evaluation questions such as "What are the strengths and weaknesses of....?' and "Do I agree or disagree with ...... when he or she says....? Why or why not?". These evaluation questions prompt you to think at the level of putting the ideas of your course into real life applications and then determining their effects, good or bad. Obviously the questions listed at the various levels do not comprise a comprehensive list. There are many many questions that you could ask. Good sources for questions are listening to the questions professors ask in class, the questions that appear in assignments, questions from text books, and so on. The Learning Skills Programme handout on "Reading University Level Materials" and "Preparing for Tests and Exams" deals with this review strategy in more detail. Writing preview questionsThe review strategy of preparing questions on the material covered in a lecture or in a text book reading can be applied not only as a way to prepare for exams, but to assist you in preparing for an upcoming lecture. Writing preview questions works the same way as applying the questioning technique outlined above, except that you look into the course outline, at lecture titles, and at information in readings that relate to your upcoming lectures for cues about what topics and ideas will be covered. You then ask yourself a series of questions to anticipate the direction of the lecture prior to attending the lecture so that you go in with some idea of where things will be heading. Some of these kind of questions can be borrowed from the concluding statements of a lecture when a professor says something like, "Next time we'll talk about why....." The purpose here isn't to predict exactly what will be covered, but to get you thinking about related information so that you begin listening to a lecture with some pertinent thoughts in mind. Consolidating the materialAll of these review strategies are essentially geared toward you better summarizing, understanding, and recalling your course materials. When the ideas of your course cease being separate items of information and begin to coalesce into a unified whole of meaning for the course, where there are themes that are supported by main ideas, main ideas supported by details of various kinds, and connections between the information and other courses and areas of study, then you can be sure that you are consolidating the information. Consolidating literally means "the process of making solid together" -- if you're shaky on any of the contents of your course, you need to work further to complete your consolidation Next: Summary Sheet |
