11.6 Knowledge Check
To Summarize
In this chapter the textbook outlined the importance of knowing your purpose before you start to read or take notes. Knowing what you will do with the information you are reading will help you determine what is important to write down, which helps you work smarter, not harder.
Different note taking styles might work better for different situations. Notes you take for math are likely very different than notes you take for biology. It will be important to identify what works best for you as you combine all that we have read about in the text: learning preferences, predicting how long things will take to accomplish, when and how long you can focus for.
Key Takeaways
- Active reading is a process of preparing, reading, capturing key ideas, and reviewing.
- To prepare, scan the chapter to find out what the chapter is about. Give yourself direction by creating questions. Write down your first question and read until you find the answer. Write down your answer, leave some space and move on to the next question. Repeat. At the end of your reading session, go back and pull out key ideas and words to add in the spaces between questions. Review by mentally answering the questions and check yourself against your reading notes.
- Taking notes is more than creating a record of what a professor said in class, it supports active listening, aids in remembering, gives clues to important concepts as well as tests your understanding of the materials and creates a study guide.
- Lists, outlines, concept maps, and the Cornell method are ways to take notes; the later three are preferred because they provide opportunities to prioritize and organize the materials.
- It is vital to return to your notes after class to review, make corrections, fill in gaps, and call out key ideas.
- Reading and taking good notes are skills that require active listening.
Reflective Practice
Answer the reflection questions below in full sentences.
Applying Your Knowledge
“9.5 Reflection” and “9.8 Key Takeaway” from Fanshawe SOAR by Kristen Cavanagh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Thinking while listening to support one's listening efforts and to help you stay focused, let you to test your understanding and help you remember the material.
A planned, deliberate set of strategies to engage with text-based materials with the purpose of increasing your understanding.
A visual way of representing information where you place a central idea in the centre of the page and then add lines and new circles in the page for new ideas. Use arrows and lines to connect the various ideas.
A two-column approach. The left column takes up no more than a third of the page and is often referred to as the “cue” or “recall” column. The right column (about two-thirds of the page) is used for taking notes using any of the methods described above or a combination of them.
A method of notetaking in which you taking down ideas as they are presented without sorting or organizing the ideas. May not be the best choice of notetaking because it is focused exclusively on capturing as much of what the professor says as possible, not on processing the information.
A method of notetaking in which you place most important ideas along the left margin, numbered with roman numerals. Supporting ideas to these main concepts are indented and are noted with capital letters and under each of these ideas, further detail can be added.
