Comments on: 3 Reasons You Shouldn’t Study From Your Notes

By: Christian Stapfer

Christian Stapfer — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 06:23:01 +0000

I still think that taking notes is a good idea. How detailed those notes have to be depends very much, I certainly agree, on the quality of the lecture, accompanying handouts and textbooks. I would always want to write down at least a list of keywords. However, for me, those notes are but the raw material to produce a set of revised notes. The process of revising the raw notes after the lecture (if possible on the same day) forces me to think back and keeps me working actively with the material, the notation and the definitions, and reinforces memory in a very natural way. For this it is, paradoxically perhaps, a good thing that my raw notes are *not* complete and *may* contain errors, therefore have to be thought through very *carefully* once more.
To just think that your textbook, the handout or wikipedia might be a better source for your study does not necessarily make you active in the same way. On the contrary, such thinking might make you lazy: it’s in the textbook, so I have it (yes, maybe, but do you have worked it through as carefully as I had to work through my raw notes?)
In support of this view I can quote Walter Kintsch, who has done much work in the area of text comprehension: “How does one create an *active* learner? We have used here for the most part the somewhat counterintuitive technique of providing the learner with a poorly written text, a text that lacks coherence, thereby *forcing* the learner to fill in the gaps in the text.” (‘Comprehension: a paradigm for cognition’, chapter 9, ‘Learning from text’)
In revising my raw notes I can work everything from those other sources that seems useful and sufficiently important into my set of revised notes. But it is my revised notes that are the basis of further study and my preparing for exams – and not those other sources. Note also, that my revised notes are a kind of “compression device”, since those other sources, no matter how high their quality might be, are typically too verbose to serve me well in the long run.

By: Jeffrey Austin White

Jeffrey Austin White — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 02:27:52 +0000

Any thoughts regarding studying with mobile apps that you can always have on hand? I just downloaded Flash Card Maker Pro from the Android Market and found it very helpful as a memory aid.

By: Ashley

Ashley — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 15:57:51 +0000

using the website that comes with the textbook is always a great bet! i once even had a teacher who just printed out the quizzes from the site and gave that as the final (in college!!?!?!!). So even though most teachers recommend not buying the book, I at least say use the website that goes along with it.

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:18:27 +0000

Yep the web is great for this, Wikipedia’s explanation of many topics is better than in textbooks (or at the very as a supplement). Finding information with ctrl-f is also much faster looking things up in a book’s index.

By: Samantha Geller

Samantha Geller — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:27:00 +0000

I think doing a little research on web also helps as it gives all different perspectives of the topic to the students. I thing giving notes is like spoon feeding.