EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLO ...

As you sit in a lecture or seminar, filling your notepad with words or furiously trying to keep up with a lecturer, you may wonder if taking notes makes a difference. It does, if used well:

·      Taking notes focuses attention during class and helps encode information so it has a chance of making it to long-term memory. In order to record key ideas in your own words, you have to translate, connect, elaborate and organise. Even if pupils don’t review notes before a test, taking them in the first place appears to aid learning, especially for those who lack prior knowledge in an area. Of course, if taking notes distracts you from actually listening to and making sense of the lecture, then note taking may not be effective.

·      Notes provide extended external storage that allows you to return and review. Pupils who use their notes to study tend to perform better on tests, especially if they take many high-quality notes – more is better as long as you are capturing key ideas, concepts and relationships, not just intriguing details.

·      Expert pupils match notes to their anticipated use and modify strategies after tests or assignments; use personal codes to flag material that is unfamiliar or difficult; fill in holes by consulting relevant sources (including other pupils in the class); record information verbatim (word-for-word) only when a verbatim response will be required. In other words, they are strategic about taking and using notes.

·      To help pupils organise their note taking, some teachers provide matrices or maps. When pupils are first learning to use these maps, you might fill in some of the spaces for them. If you use maps and matrices with your pupils, encourage them to exchange their filled-in maps and explain their thinking to each other.

Epistemological beliefs

Finally, what pupils believe about knowledge and learning (their epistemological beliefs) will influence the kinds of strategies that they use.

Using questions like those in the Pause and Reflect below, researchers have identified several dimensions of epistemological beliefs

For example:

● Structure of knowledge: Is knowledge in a field a simple set of facts or a complex structure of concepts and relationships?

● Stability/certainty of knowledge: Is knowledge fixed or evolving over time?

● Ability to learn: Is the ability to learn fixed (based on innate ability) or changeable?

● Speed of learning: Can we gain knowledge quickly or does it take time to develop knowledge?

● Nature of learning: Does learning mean memorising facts passed down from authorities and keeping the facts isolated, or developing your own integrated understandings?

Pupils’ beliefs about knowing and learning affect their use of learning strategies. For example, if you believe that knowledge should be gained quickly, you are likely to try one or two quick strategies (read the text once, spend two minutes trying to solve the word problem) and then stop. If you believe that learning means developing integrated understandings, you will process the material more deeply, connect to existing knowledge, create your own examples, or draw diagrams, and generally elaborate the information to make it your own.