Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Teaching Students to Take Notes

If your students are doing poorly on tests, or if you see that they are not taking notes in class, then it may be time for you to teach them how to take notes. Do not assume that your students know how to take good notes.

Here is a suggestion for how to teach note-taking skills and connect the ability to take good notes with test scores:

-Prepare a 5 minute lecture.
-Create a basic skeleton of an outline for the lecture.
-Proceed with delivering your lecture.
-Mentally note the extent to which students are actively involved in taking notes.
-Give a quick quiz after the lecture.
-Review the quiz scores with students and discuss the extent to which to which taking notes during the lecture helped them retain the lecture material in their minds. To what extent did the high scorers on the quiz take detailed notes?

This would be a great time to have students compare their notes with the class. Weaker note takers can learn from the stronger note takers, plus it can also lead to some lively discussion in the class.

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