Note Taking

• Read your assignment before you come to class. Note taking comes easier when you already have some understanding or awareness of the material. 

• Get organized. Begin each lecture on a new page. It’s important to date each new lecture, and number your pages. After class, make sure you go back to add a topic/heading to the top of each page to make finding specific information easier. 

• Give yourself room. Consider writing on only one side of the paper, for greater legibility. Use loose-leaf notebooks for notes, which makes it easy to organize them when you review, as well as to rearrange your notes, insert additional materials like handouts and study guides, and insert notes you borrow from study partners or classmates. Most importantly, don’t worry about using up all the available space on the page—give yourself room to go back and add information as your instructor continues to talk, and to make extra notes when you make connections in class.

• Think while you write! This means you can’t write down every single word your instructor says. If you try to transcribe your teacher’s lecture, you have no room for thinking about what you’re writing and how it fits together, and you inevitably fall behind and get frustrated. As you listen and write, think about what information is most likely to be of use later, whether on a test, in an essay, or in completing a project. Focus on points that directly relate to or illustrate your reading. And during class, listen for verbal cues from your instructor that indicate important information. 

• Ask questions. As you listen and write, make sure to record your questions, things you asked the professor about. This will help you stay aware of potential gaps in your understanding, and make sure you focus on those parts of the material when reviewing your notes later, and look up information you need to help strengthen what you’ve learned. 

• Develop a system. Outlining? Numbered paragraphs? A mind-map? Charts and graphs? There’s no right way to organize your notes. Experiment with the way that best reflects how you listen, how you think, and how you process information.

• Review. After the lecture, go through your notes. Consider leaving space on each page or after each important section of class, for a short summary, in your own words, of the material you covered. This can help you process the information by making you think it through and ensuring you understand it. Reviewing your notes also helps you remember the material, underscores the instructor’s lecture, and lets you add things you want to make sure you don’t forget and organize material that is connected. 

The format provides the perfect opportunity for following through with the 5 R's of note-taking. Here they are: 

1. Record. During the lecture, record in the main column as many meaningful facts and ideas as you can. Write legibly. 

2. Reduce. As soon after as possible, summarize these ideas and facts concisely in the Recall Column. Summarizing clarifies meanings and relationships, reinforces continuity, and strengthens memory. Also, it is a way of preparing for examinations gradually and well ahead of time. 

3. Recite. Now cover the column, using only your jottings in the Recall Column as cues or "flags" to help you recall, say over facts and ideas of the lecture as fully as you can, not mechanically, but in your own words and with as much appreciation of the meaning as you can. Then, uncovering your notes, verify what you have said. This procedure helps to transfer the facts and ideas of your long term memory. 

4. Reflect. Reflective students distill their opinions from their notes. They make such opinions the starting point for their own musings upon the subjects they are studying. Such musings aid them in making sense out of their courses and academic experiences by finding relationships among them. Reflective students continually label and index their experiences and ideas, put them into structures, outlines, summaries, and frames of reference. They rearrange and file them. Best of all, they have an eye for the vital-for the essential. Unless ideas are placed in categories, unless they are taken up from time to time for reexamination, they will become inert and soon forgotten. 

5. Review. If you will spend 10 minutes every week or so in a quick review of these notes, you will retain most of what you have learned, and you will be able to use your knowledge currently to greater and greater effectiveness 

To succeed in college, important ideas from lectures and textbooks must be identified, organized, recorded, practiced, and stored in long term memory for recall when needed. The Notecard Question and Answer Technique (NQAT) helps students do these important tasks required for learning. Using NQAT, many students have uncovered a previously hidden ability to learn and remember better than ever before and earn higher grades. The benefits of using NQAT include developing an easy way to gather and organize information to be learned, saving time because it speeds up learning and performing better on exams resulting in better grades. 

1) Purchase notecards for recording main ideas and details. The size may be 3 x 5, 4 x 6, or 5 x 8 inches depending on the amount of material to be recorded, handwriting size, and if you want to include memory boosters such as drawings, pictures, diagrams, charts, or tables. 

2) Turn main points from lectures and textbooks into questions. Place a question on one side of a notecard and its answer on the other. With math or science problems, put a problem on one side and the solution, step-by-step, on the other. 

3) Place only one question and its answer on a notecard. This makes it easier to organize and reorganize the ideas into meaningful groups, categories, or sequences, if needed. 

4) Avoid complete sentences or spelling out every word. Use short phrases for sentences and symbols and abbreviations for words. This results in greater condensation of ideas which leads to less review time and less total substance to recall. 

5) Indicate where the information on each notecard is from by jotting down page numbers (if from the text) or dates (if from lecture). This permits quick reference should there be confusion or uncertainty. 

6) Keep notecards separate for each course using rubber bands or different colored cards. Use rubber bands to keep the "learned" cards separate from the "yet to be learned" cards in each subject. 

7) When making questions for notecards, use the clues to main ideas and important details that authors and lecturers provide.