Taking Notes
By Kevin
We all take notes during lectures; I've got friends who practically pen down everything the lecturer says and others who merely fills up blanks in the notes. I'm pretty sure neither constitutes note taking so I decided to explore what taking notes mean in education and learning. My questions was; how do you take notes that would benefit you in learning the stuff of interest?
Do it right
Lectures
At lectures, I found that the best was stick to the stuff given, filling in blanks wherever necessary and taking note of things not mentioned in the notes given. Don't allow the note-taking to distract you from learning during the lecture. Listening to the teacher and observing the projected slides or images or even looking at the demonstrations that the lecturers are showing are way more important than getting the notes down. The fact is that you're going to remember things more clearly when you focus and not when you write them down. Of course, information locked in paper has their kind of permanence but then you're compromising on some subtle details in those information if you're trying to get down everything during the lecture.
I believe that any knowledge or information impressed upon the mind in the form of the booming voice of a lecturer or the visual memory of a live demonstration in the lecture hall of an experiment would be way stronger than something you try to memorise off a sheet of paper. Besides, these strong impressions tied to your lecturers, professors and tutors would give you the confidence in the information you manage to lock within your mind. Information you read off notes or memorise from textbook would provide less confidence because you would have doubts about your own means of interpretation or your reading of the stuff when you're at exam situation.
Revision
Most people I know don't take notes during revisions. Revisions are the time to read through notes you've written, they say. Wrong! The thing about writing notes is that it's not so much for your reading pleasure later but for the act of doing it. The act of writing notes (in the right way, a point to be elaborated later) actually helps you absorb and remember the concepts. The idea is to transfer facts and knowledge into your mind and not on to another piece of paper. The paraphasing, the need to look up dictionaries for technical terms you're unsure about, the work involved in finding out what each concept or theory seeks to explain are all part of the process of note-writing when you're revising for your exams or tests and these are exactly the same things that will contribute to your learning.
And when you take notes during revision, synthesize materials and knowledge you obtain from different sources - the textbooks, the reference materials, your readings, lecture notes and the informal stuff you've written down yourself. Write things down because they guide you to learn the concept/subject in question and not because they've been printed on the sources where you try to copy them from.
The Right Way
After being a student for so many years, I've come to believe that there's a 'right' way to take notes. First, take down only concise materials and not chunks off textbooks, readings and lecture notes. Next, write only things you understand and find out things that you don't during the process of note taking. In other words, get beside a computer and google stuff you're unsure about as you try to take notes from your readings and so on. Just don't become distracted by the computer and end up being on Facebook. Finally, draw diagrams whenever necessary but don't get too concerned with trying to beautify your notes and take hours sketching brilliant artworks - the whole point is to practice applying, penning the stuff you learn.
A final note is that your notes should ideally be comprehended only by people who are already familiar with the things taught in class or have already read through everything that you've read to compile the information. Your notes should not be a duplicate of everything explained on your lectures and end up becoming another textbook of sorts.
Domino Theory of the Mind
By Kevin
Don't let the next topple!
Ever had the experience of failing a long stream of exam or an entire Final Examination? Did you blame it on your luck because you already studied very hard for it? After the first paper which you found particularly difficult, you start to realize you didn't really study hard enough and then you can't do the rest of the papers that came up? The truth turned out to be that the first paper was indeed hard but the rest of the papers were easy and you could have done well if you knew just how to discipline your mind.
The mind is a pattern-recognition system and it has a huge catchment area, meaning that slight semblance of a pattern can activate your mind to conceive it. This is why when you experience something traumatizing that affects all your senses, the fear stays around for very long time and it is very hard to forget the trauma - every little sign or stimulus that resemble anything you experienced during that event would cause your mind to conceive/imagine and thus relive the entire experience. Overcoming this takes a lot of mental courage and discipline.
The same is true for whatever that goes in the mind that cause the 'Domino Effect' for exams. The first paper during the examination period becomes the traumatizing experience and in subsequent papers, you relive the experience, at times even amplifying the fears in your mind. When you encounter a difficult question at the start of the next paper, you start panicking, and after wasting some time calming yourself down you spend too much time trying to prove yourself by attempting the question. This is just one of the ways this effect manifest and cause you to perform poorly for one paper after another. Losing focus, forgetting facts, mis-reading questions, dwelling too long over a particular question you found tricky are all means your experience with the first paper was taking a toil on you.
To avoid getting affected by the 'Domino Effect', we need to isolate the initial domino from the rest. That way when it falls, it does not trigger the other dominos. We should thus clear our minds after each exam to 'reset' our emotion state. This also mean seeing every paper as separate and treating exam-taking objective. You have studied for every subject separately and you've worked hard, there's no reason why you should allow one paper to affect your performance in any others. In your mind, isolate every test-taking or exam-taking experience so that you can treat them fairly and not shortchange yourself.
Use Your Tests!
By Kevin
Let's say you get back your examination papers today - perhaps for mid-years, a prelim paper, or perhaps promos; alright, maybe it's just a common test - what do you do with the paper? For most students, they just chuck it aside feeling despair or elated with the results; more hardworking ones will probably try and look through the mistakes, see which are the parts they got wrong or calculate the total scores. After all, what done cannot be undone, better to move on to the next phase or life (ie. the next test or exam or subject).
So is that the right way of doing things? NO! Absolutely wrong! Every test, exam or any sort of controlled assessment are valuable experience and tools that you have to use to the fullest in education. The entire process of learning about the exam/test/quiz, taking the paper, getting the papers back and the emotions you experience from there are all points where you can learn about your abilities and come up with ways to overcome any problems you have with school work. Today, I'm going to teach you how you can 'Use Your Tests!'
Pre-Exam Preparation Work
A student who can't be bothered about school never knows when tests are coming; one who cares a bit simply notes the date; the type who bothers note the date, subject, possibly venue. Hardworking students will probably find out the topics covered in the test on top of that and store that information in some sort of planner or notebook. But we all want to strive to be smart students and what do we do? We note down all that information, record them in a planner, look out for free days prior to the test where we can invest some time studying, systematically plan out how are we going to cover all the topics that will be tested. We go an extra mile by coming up with a checklist containing the list of topics and a label stating how confident we are with that area of work and we proceed to write down specific task that we are going to undertake to improve ourselves. These specific task should be like this:
Read up page 46 to 54 of the 'World of Physics' textbook and work out all the example questions.
Check Lecture Notes for any unfilled blanks and ask Tommy what for the missing information.
Go through tutorial mistakes for 'Electromagnetism' and note down concepts that I'm still unclear with.
It's up to you to make a choice whether to do these or not based on how important you view the test/exam. More important is that you actually discipline yourself to carry out your 'To-Do List' since you've already spent the effort to pen these matters down. As you study you might decide that there are more things to do than you previously planned - you might decide to do more practice on an assessment book or go through a guidebook that your Mum just got for you. Go ahead as long as it doesn't interfere with what you have originally laid out for yourself.
The Exam
Just work on the exam paper as best as you can; as long as you feel you are adequately prepared, your stress levels should be acceptable. What we have done before the test is to prepare you in terms of knowledge tested and also to convince your mind that you've been working and there's thus no need to fear. Many people tend to be smart enough to handle test without much studying but they actually fail to convince themselves that they are adequately prepared; this causes them to fumble easily during the test and panic when they see foreign-looking terms on their papers.
Post-Exams & Results
Right after each exam, clear your mind and stop thinking about it until you get back your paper. This way, you don't allow an 'domino effect' in your mind (a description coined by Spiffy), where a single exam paper at the start occupies your mind so much that you lose focus and morale for the subsequent papers leading you to flunk the entire exam.
Once you get back your paper, the first thing you should be concerned about is not the scores itself but whether it has been calculated properly. Then analyze your paper. When I say analyze, I mean it. Look at the mistakes you have made, identify the reason for the mistakes. These reasons can usually be found in the following list:
Didn't know that was in the syllabus
Didn't study that part of the topic (Didn't know it's tested or didn't bother)
Studied the topic but forgot the concept on the spot
Understood the topic but unable to apply the concepts
Insufficient substantiation in explanations or unable to cover all the points needed in the question (problems associated with answering techniques)
Read or interpreted the question wrongly; questions might have been poorly phrased
Careless on your part
Jot down these reasons beside each of the questions you made mistake for. Apparently for every reason you got a question wrong, there's a logical and effective means of overcoming the problem. In some cases (like in the first point), the exam/test itself solves the problem. Now you know that particular knowledge is required in the syllabus. When you didn't study a topic because you didn't know it is going to be tested or can't be bothered, then you have to review your Pre-Exam preparation techniques.
When you studied but still got things wrong like in the 3rd, 4th and 5th point, it means that your studying methods, application and answering techniques are not correct. Attempt to correct them by asking around with your friends about how they managed to solve the questions and studied the concepts involved. Sometimes it's just about remembering things better but it can also be about understanding the theories from a fresh perspective.
In the last 2 cases, you can count yourself unlucky but it also means your examination techniques are not well established. Do more practice and look through questions as well as your answers carefully. Often we are angry with ourselves for such mistakes but then we can try and re-live that moment during the exam and ask ourselves if we could have avoided it. Perhaps it wasn't possible that time, but in future it'll not be the same. We are not saying that you must attain perfect score all the time; it's just that marks should never be wasted because of such trivia reasons. As far as possible, we want the test/exam to be an accurate assessment of your abilities and your efforts.
After all that analysis, come up with a plan to overcome all the flaws in your techniques and also learning so that you have a good head start for the challenges to come. This way, your tests/exams are not wasted even if you attained a trashy score. If your exams are just over, don't wait till you find out about the next test/exam before embarking on the methods I introduced, start right now by analyzing that paper you screwed up!
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