Effective Note Taking

Question 1

1. Keeps you Alert

Answer 1

• Nota taking keeps your body active and involved and helps you avoid feelings of drowsiness or distraction

Question 2

2. Engages your mind

Answer 2

• Listening carefully and deciding what to include in notes keeps your mind actively involved with what you hear

Question 3

3. Emphasizes and organizes information.

Answer 3

• As you take notes, you’ll decide on and highlight the key ideas you hear, identifying the structure of a class presentation.
• be able to indicate the supporting points of a presentation, making study and understanding easier after class.
• make it easier for you to link classroom learning to textbook readings.

Question 4

4. Creates a condensed record for study

Answer 4

• gives you what you need for study, learning, and review after class

Question 5

Why Take Notes?

Answer 5

• students recall more lecture material if they record it in their notes and perform better on tests of recall and synthesis than students who do not take notes.
• Note-taking serves two distinct functions for students: external storage and cognitive encoding.
• External Storage: Notes serve as a place to keep knowledge and information for later review
• Cognitive Encoding: serves a vital function in helping to write the information on the brain. The literature (Foos, Mora & Tkacz 1994; Katayama 2005) shows that people better retain materials that they have generated themselves than materials generated by others (and that students actually begin to learn and memorize during note-taking,