CHAPARRAL

Notes on Note-taking, or I Wrote Down Everything, 
But None of It Made Sense

Aw the feeling.... You're on a major roll. You have spent hours carefully organizing your lecture and now it's paying off. As you glance out at the students, you see their pens and pencils in frenzied motion, as if every syllable you utter holds weight and significance. Your heart pumps with the joy of it. You give them more, more, more. A week or two later, you give them an exam and feel somewhat less elated to put it mildly. Why did so many of them not bother to read all the notes they took? How could they be so confused about the basic concepts, so incapable of recalling the connections between ideas? Often, however, the problem isn't that students haven't studied but that they can't make sense of what they have so elaborately scrawled. Of course, you don't want to do their work for them, so short of handing out your lecture notes, telling exactly what's on the test, and calling it a day, what can you do about it? Here are three quick and easy methods that have worked for me.

• First, teach them what you mean by taking effective, organized notes. Believe it or not, approximately 90 percent of our students have never been shown how to take notes. If you don't believe me, just walk around the class looking at their methods some time. You will find masses of undifferentiated scribbling and wonder how they could possibly figure out what's important three weeks later. So, why not pass out an example of good notes? I don't, by the way, mean neat or beautiful-looking notes. I mean notes which use some way of visibly identifying main ideas, important sub-points, and key details and of quickly translating jargon into a student's own way of speaking. One fast and effective method is for students to leave a wide left-hand margin so they can write in quick translations or insert comments and to simply use indentations to indicate the relative importance of ideas instead of fiddling with Roman numerals under time pressure. It's also very important to tell them that they ought to go over their notes to make sure they’re clear while their short-term memories are still fairly effective--usually within twenty-four hours.

• Give them pauses to work on their notes. By now, the idea that we shouldn't lecture non-stop may seem like a well-worn point, but it's the easiest one to forget when we get on a verbal roll, and most of the time when we pause, we don't do much to directly impact their note-taking. Why not use a pause to give them a chance to organize and clarify their class notes? They could do this individually or collaboratively (especially if they're in permanent study groups). The simplest and most effective way I've found to do this is to ask them to spend five minutes underlining or highlighting their main ideas and sub-points and using the margin of their notes to translate anything they've written that they might not understand later. If a lesson has a particular emphasis, I also sometimes use this opportunity to have the students make a time-line or flow chart or columns of comparison and contrast. These activities produce very practical questions about what's important, help them get the information into their long-term memories, and lead to better test results. Most important, it encourages the right note-taking habits.

• Grade their notes. What more direct way could there be to see if they're getting your lecture? You don't have to read every word, just see if they have the main points, important sub-points, and key details clearly identified. In fact, I usually just take a couple of minutes to do this right in class rather than actually collecting their notes, and I don't tell them when I'm going to do it. Since this counts as quiz points, I've found that students make a much greater effort to take good notes, and sometimes a forced habit sticks. That's all I can think of for now, but I'm always looking for suggestions. If you have any ideas about encouraging good note-taking, please send them to me by e-mail (staylor@glendale.cc.ca.us) or leave a phone message at x5642.

Want to see more really good teaching ideas? Come to "Eats and Ideas" and visit "Teaching Ideas from GCC Faculty" on our Title V web site. In addition to the growing list of ideas from our own teachers, you'll find all sorts of links to teaching resources which Sue Brinkmeyer has arranged.

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