TRANSCRIPT: Study Tips & Note-Taking Strategies

Speaker: Laurie Hazzard

Study Tips & Note-Taking Strategies: What Every Student Should Know

My name is Laurie Hazard, and at the university where I work I’m in charge of the student success programs and I teach in the Applied Psychology department. One of my roles at the University is to work with students on their study strategies. So today we’re going to be talking about a variety of study strategies including getting you to think about how you prepare for exams, what note taking strategies you use, and what reading strategies you use. We’re going to combine those three elements to think about a comprehensive study system that will prepare you for your tests and your quizzes right from the first day of classes.

What's The Point?

So first I’d like you to think about the courses that you’re taking this semester or this quarter. Maybe you’re taking three classes, maybe you’re taking five classes, you could only be taking one class. But chances are there’s a class on your schedule that you haven’t been exposed to before. You might have had history in high school, but you might not have had anthropology. So anthropology is going to be a new body of knowledge that you’re going to be exposed to. So for every class, the goal is to master a new body of knowledge in a particular subject area. So what we’re going to talk about is how are you going to go about mastering that new body of knowledge.

Your Results

Now let’s take a look at the results of this diagnostic tool. Typically what happens when students don’t fare well on a test or a quiz, they’ll tell me it’s because they have test anxiety. Nine times out of ten students don’t really have test anxiety. It’s not what happens during the test that causes them not to do well. It has to do with their preparedness. So, indeed, this diagnostic tool asks questions about your preparedness for tests, quizzes and exams. So if you answered no to any of the questions, that tells me that you haven’t done everything within your power to prepare in advance for your tests and exams. So what we’re going to do today is look at a comprehensive study strategy that will enable you to answer yes to all of these questions, and in doing so it will prepare you to do well on your next set of tests and quizzes.

How Do You Process Information?

So what kinds of preparation activities will you engage in to master this body of knowledge? In other words, what exactly do you have to do? Well first we need to consider the way that human beings process information. And how human beings process information begins with three major modalities. Modalities are as follows. First they use visual processing, which means processing information by seeing. Human beings also use auditory processing, meaning that you’ll process information by listening. And you’ll find that you’re going to be using a lot of auditory processing during your lectures. And then students use tactile kinesthetic processing, and that’s processing information by doing. An activity of processing information by doing might be taking notes out of your textbook and writing notes during lecture. Writing is a tactile kinesthetic process.

Let me see if I can demonstrate this idea of the three different learning modalities for you. What I’d like you to do right now is close your eyes and see if you can use what I call your visual memory to reconstruct the environment around you. Focus on your mind’s eye. What color are the walls of the room that you’re in. Don’t open your eyes. What color is the carpet? What’s on the desk? What exactly can you see in your environment? Maybe think back to a class you had this morning. Can you recall with your visual memory what the professor was wearing? As you were walking from building to building to get to your class, what’s around you when you’re moving from building A to building B? And in as much detail as you can, see if you can use your visual memory to reconstruct your environment.

Before you open your eyes, see if you can guess what color I’m wearing.

Effortful Processing

Now open your eyes. Did you have a right guess about what color I was wearing? Some people have really good visual memory processing skills. Other people don’t. So for some of you the visual cues in your environment naturally sink in without you having to think too clearly about it. For other people they might have to do what we call effortful processing. So effortful processing is making a decision to decide to put information from your short-term memory into your long-term memory. So for those of you who couldn’t recall what I was wearing, if I had said to you, take a look at what I’m wearing and see if you can recall in five minutes, you probably would have been able to do so because you were consciously monitoring the visual cues in your environment.

So if I were to say to you at the end of this talk, I am going to give you an exam on all of the information that you learned during the course of this talk, during the course of the talk you would do what we call effortful processing and you would try to recall very specifically what I discussed. That’s effortful processing.

Bare Bones

So we’ve been talking about effortful processing. So how does effortful processing affect your ability to master a body of knowledge? Well, typically when students are learning a body of knowledge, you have to begin with what we call the bare bones facts. So I’m going to use an anatomy analogy to talk about constructing a body of knowledge. First we’re going to start with the skeletal overview. So in order to master more complex information, you have to start with the bare bone facts. Let’s take a math example for instance. If you didn’t know your math facts, that is your time tables, you would never be able to solve the problem 7n equals 14. What does n equal? Well that’s a pretty easy equation to solve. N equals 2. But if you didn’t know your multiplication tables or your math facts, you would never be able to solve that information. So at the beginning of mastering a body of knowledge it’s important for you to learn your bare bone facts and effortfully process those bare bone facts.

Tacit Knowledge

So another way of thinking about bare bones facts is this idea of tacit knowledge. And this is personal knowledge and personal information that we may bring with us to a college classroom that we already know. So let’s say you’re taking a history class and you know that Thomas Jefferson is the third president of the United States. That’s simple tacit knowledge that you know and understand that you learned in high school. There may be another student sitting in your class that knows a little bit more than you do. They know, for example, that Thomas Jefferson was the ambassador to France during the American Revolution. So they have more complicated, complex tacit knowledge information than you have as you’re both entering into this class. It’s okay if you don’t have tacit knowledge because the good news is you can create tacit knowledge by using outlining in your reading. And outlining is a way to create bare bones facts about a chapter. So that’s one good thing to know, that tacit knowledge can be created if you don’t bring it with you to the college classroom.

Creating An Outline

So creating an outline for your textbook-driven classes is an effective way to create tacit knowledge. And what I tell students is create an outline before you go to class instead of doing what we call that monotonous plodding word-by-word reading. Monotonous plodding word-by-word reading can be difficult, and what tends to happen is when we do that, if we don’t have tacit knowledge, the information just doesn’t stick in our heads. So creating an outline will help information stick in your head.

So what I tell students is to start out by creating an outline on a Sunday or Monday night for your classes that are coming up during the week. So let’s say you’re taking economics or biology or sociology. What you would want to do before you go to class, instead of that monotonous plodding word-by-word reading that I mentioned, is to create an outline so that when you go into class you have the tacit knowledge created for your listening comprehension during your lesson.

So, if you could take a second out now to look at a textbook and peek inside of it and see how the main headings are depicted. How are the subheadings depicted? And how is the content vocabulary represented in the text? You probably notice that some of them are in bold print or capital. You might even see different colors that would depict the main headings and the subheadings. You might see lower case letters, and you might see graphic organizers or pictures that represent the textual material. Take a look in your textbook and really analyze how the author has organized and represented the information to you, the reader.

Outline Activity

Now I’d like you to choose a chapter to take a look at that is coming up in a next assignment. And I’d like you to examine the slide before you and actually start an outline. What you should do is assign a Roman numeral I to the main headings. Assign As and Bs to the subheadings. And most likely in your textbook you’ll see some content vocabulary that’s either in bold print or italics. What I’d like you to do there is assign a one, two, or a three to those concepts. And what we’re actually doing here is creating the tacit knowledge by making a skeletal overview of the chapter.

What you see now in front of you is a sample from the psychology textbook on a chapter called Sleep and Dreams.

Why Should I Do This?

So if you make the honest effort to take one of your textbook-driven classes and do an outline, you’re going to find that with some courses it will take you about an hour to create an outline and other courses, if the material is really dense, it could take you upwards of two hours to do an outline.

Sometimes when students hear this they get a little bit overwhelmed and they ask why should I do this. There are a wide variety of reasons why you should take the time to outline. Oftentimes as a faculty member I’ll have students come up to me and say, I had no idea what was going to be on the test. And I tell them if they had taken the time to outline their chapters, what they’re essentially doing is making a list of all of the key content vocabulary and all of the main subject areas that are going to be covered in the chapter, and in this way they’re really making a list of what could possibly show up on the test of exam.

I also tell students that this strategy forces them to cross over two of the learning modalities. One is the visual learning modality. Essentially they will have a visual overview of the entire chapter. If they go through the act of the tactile kinesthetic processing of writing, they’ll cross over the kinesthetic learning modality.

In addition, what I tell students to do as they’re taking their outline is to record the pages where they’re finding the information. In this way they’re creating a reference guide for themselves.

Bringing your outline to class is very helpful as well because it will help you increase your listening comprehension during your lectures.

Use Your Outline In Class

So why would you bring your outline to class with you? You might be thinking I’m going to be taking notes from a notebook while I’m listening to my professor’s lecture. What I’m going to tell you is to do both. Bring your outline to class with you and then bring your notebook. As you’re listening to what your professor is saying, you can take a highlighter, and if they mention something specific that’s on the outline, you can highlight that with your outline. Then you’re going to be continuing to take notes. Doing both activities will focus your attention on the lecture and it will give you something to do in class.

Once class is over, you’ve crossed over your auditory learning modality because you’ve listened to the professor lecture on the information, and you’ve also crossed over your kinesthetic learning modality because you’ve taken notes during lecture.

You’ve probably heard study skills experts and teachers say to you that it’s really important to review your notes as short as possible after class. It serves memory retention if you can do a quick review after class. So what I’m going to suggest you do is an activity called marrying your notes and your readings.

Marry Your Notes & Readings

So what do I mean by marrying your notes and your readings? That probably sounds a little bit funny. Well what I would like you to do right now is look at how your textbook represents the information that you learned in class compared to how your instructor represented the information in class. Your professor does not have time during lecture to go into all of the level of detail that you would find in your textbook. Inevitably he or she is going to have to leave some of the supporting details out.

Some of the examples you find in your textbook won’t necessarily be discussed in your lecture. So what you want to do is analyze the difference between your notes and your readings, and how you do that is bringing those two sources together and seeing how different examples from your notes and your readings are represented. In other words, bringing your notes and your readings together is marrying your notes and your reading.

See how the information in your book is expressed differently from your notes. It’s a compare-and- contrast exercise. Compare the two sources and see how they represent the information differently. You may even find that your professor brings up different points in the lecture that you might not necessarily find in your textbook. So you want to compare the two sources and see where the missing links between the information are.

So you want to compare and see the missing links between the two sources and see where the information is. So that to me is really reviewing your lecture notes and reviewing it in a way that you’re integrating your textbook information in with your class notes.

Industrial Revolution Example

One important task that gets accomplished when you’re comparing your notes and your readings is that it allows you to analyze the language differences between the text and between your notes.

Here’s what I mean by this. Let’s say that you’re taking a history class, and your professor says, okay, class, today we’re going to go over how the workforce changed during the Industrial Revolution. One of the ways in which the workforce changed during the Industrial Revolution is that child labor laws changed. Children were no longer allowed to work in factories. So today we’re going to talk about all of the different ways the work force changed during the Industrial Revolution.

Thinking about the introduction to that history lesson, there probably weren’t very many vocabulary blocks for you. I’m guessing you know what “work” means. You know what a “workforce” is. And you know what the word “change” means. If you go back to your textbook, you might find different language to express the exact same information that you heard during your lecture. You might read something like this during your textbook analysis. The American labor force evolved during the Industrial Revolution. So while labor and work are the same thing, labor is a more sophisticated vocabulary word to express the idea of work. Again, evolve and change are the same thing, but evolve is a more sophisticated vocabulary word to suggest change or transformation. So basically you are going to notice that textbooks tend to use more sophisticated language than notes would tend to use. As a good reader, you’re going to need to do some translation of text language and note language. The notes are in your own words and you’ve listened to what your professor said, so you’ll have to take his or her words and put that information into your own words. When you do this you tend to lose information in the process. Students learn information in more simplified language, which is a fine thing to do but there’s always a step that seems to be missing when college students have trouble on multiple choice exam.

When students learn information in a more simplified language, while that’s a fine thing to do, there is always a step that tends to be missing when students have trouble on multiple choice exams. That is, they forget to go back and look at the sophisticated information in the text and what’s represented there. So the purpose of this exercise of marrying your notes and your reading is to do that language analysis and that language comparison.

I bet some of you have run out of time in tests before. You haven’t been able to finish. Typically the reason for that is because you’re doing the active translation of the textbook language and notebook language during the test-taking situation. This strategy is going to minimize that problem for you. you’re going to be doing the comparison and translation of the language of the notes and the text while you’re studying rather than during the test-taking situation. So that is why I suggest you marry your notes and your readings.

Cornell Style Of Note-Taking

So now that I’ve given you the rationale for why it’s important to compare your notes and your reading, how might you actually do this in practice? Well, there are a couple of different ways. One is using a modified system of the Cornell style of note taking. What I would do is take my notes maybe on just one side of my notebook. That is, take your class notes on the right-hand side. Be sure to leave lots of room.

Next, what you’re going to do is an activity that will take place after class. You've recorded your class notes on the right-hand side. When you review your notes after class and you have your textbook with you, you're going to compare your notes and your readings. What you will find is that the textbook, for example, might have additional information in it that your notes didn't have. On the left-hand side of your notebook, you are going to record all the additional textbook information. That way on the left-hand side you will have the textbook information right alongside the notebook information that you heard in your lecture.

So it’s typical that I hear from students that this strategy is a lot of work, but it’s important to take the time to compare your notes and your readings because that will create a situation where you’re using sophisticated thinking skills.

Bloom's Taxonomy

So, what are sophisticated thinking skills? In 1956, a psychologist named Benjamin Bloom worked with other psychologists to develop a hierarchy of learning levels and it's called Bloom's Taxonomy. A newer version was published in 2001, and is widely used today.

There are actually six levels of learning that were identified by Bloom and his colleagues, Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating and Creating, where the very lowest level is remembering.

Remembering involves just memorizing information verbatim. For example, let's say I'm taking a biology class and I decide that I am going to memorize a bunch of definitions in order to prepare for my exam. Osmosis is diffusion through semipermeable membrane from a region of higher concentration to a region of lower concentration. Do I even understand what I just said? In college, you don't necessarily have questions on exams like, what is osmosis? You're going to have more sophisticated higher order thinking questions like how does osmosis affect homeostasis during cellular metabolism? Remembering is necessary. It is foundational but it is simply a first step in learning. You often have to memorize to learn the bare facts, to know a definition. However, simply knowing a fact or a definition will not make you successful in college. You have to go beyond memorization into what we call higher order thinking skills. That’s where Bloom’s Taxonomy comes in.

The next level of learning is understanding. If you're at the understanding level, you'll be able to put the things you have learned into context. You can explain ideas or concepts and give examples. You will be able to demonstrate your knowledge of the material.

If you're at the applying level, you can now use the information you've learned and apply it to new situations or different circumstances that you didn't cover in class or that weren’t covered in your readings.

When you are at analyzing, you can now take any concept and break it down into simpler concepts. You can draw connections, you can compare and contrast. You can conduct experiments. You can now understand the concept as a whole but also its components and how they work together.

When you are at evaluating, you will be able to use all that you have learned to justify your position, critique various viewpoints and review various research elements that support or negate a certain position or argument.

And then finally, if you're at the creating level, you would be able to come up with your own original thought, position or work. You would be generating new ideas, designing something new like writing a novel, building a model, revising a process for new results.

Hopefully, you can see the difference between the various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, from the bottom level of remembering to the top level where you would be creating your own information, your own theories. In order to be a successful college student, you will want to employ higher level thinking skills. But how will you know if you are ready, if you are prepared? You will need to self-evaluate.

Self-Evaluate

So how might you self-evaluate to determine whether you’re ready to go in and take that test or quiz? What I typically hear from students is they use what we call auditory rehearsal strategies. That is they’ll ask a friend or their roommate to quiz them. They’ll say, for example, okay, tell me what Freud’s three parts of the personality are. And you recite to your friend, id, ego and super ego. So you’re doing recitation or auditory rehearsal. Or I often see students covering up their book or covering up their notes and trying to memorize information and peeking. Again, they tend to use these auditory rehearsal strategies. I often ask students how many oral exams do you have in college? Most of your exams are written exams, so it’s really important, while recitation is helpful, to really study in the modality that you’re going to be taking your test. So what I say to students is write to learn. If you’re having a written exam, you should be preparing for that exam by writing things down.

What I often say to students is stick your notebook and your textbook in a closet and lock it and then see if you can reconstruct the information in writing without cheating and peeking at your text or your notes. If you’re able to do that without looking at your text or your notes, chances are you’ve evaluated yourself and you’re prepared for that exam.

Stick With It

So let’s recap the step-by-step process of mastering a body of knowledge. Again the first thing that you’re going to want to do is outline from your textbook. This will help increase your listening comprehension for lectures. Next you’re going to go to lecture and listen to the information that your professor is discussing during lecture. You can have your outline with you at lecture and highlight the information that’s found both in the textbook and your professor’s notes. Chances are if they’re showing up in both sources they’re going to be on the test.

After class you’re going to review your notes and your readings, that is, marry the information. This is the point at which you’re going to want to pluck those extra examples out of your textbook so you can see the application of the terms that your professor talked about during lecture.

Next what you’re going to do is think about whether or not you’re prepared and do a self-evaluation. This is the step where I mentioned to you where you’re going to hide your notes and your readings and see if you can reconstruct the information from memory, that effortful processing and write to learn. If you can do this in a step-by-step fashion, you’ve mastered a body of knowledge.

Now students will tell me this sounds like a lot of work. And the truth is, it is a lot of work. It takes time to master a new body of knowledge. But the good news is that this particular study strategy has been researched at colleges and universities across the country. What we find is that students who use the strategy after they’ve taken a test, they can improve their scores by like ten points. So if you get a C on your first test and then apply the strategy, chances are you can improve your scores by eight to ten points. That’s a whole letter grade. So I think that’s a pretty good argument as to why to use the study strategy. I think if you make the good effort to use it, you’ll see the same kinds of results that other college students have seen when they’ve applied the strategy.