> Should you concentrate on taking notes or should you concentrate on understanding what you are learning?
I always always erred on the latter. I was definitely in the minority. It took me ages to work out why nobody else ever asked questions (or challenged errors).
They were just writing stuff down to process later. I have never understood it, it seems so obviously like a wasted opportunity. At that point why go to class at all, you could just get sent notes!
Most effective learning experience I ever had was reading the relevant book chapter before class, taking some broad notes to structure my understanding, and then asking questions during class when either the lecture didn’t make sense or we reached a confusion I had from reading.
I only managed one class like that and only near the end of my undergraduate career. Both earlier in ugrad and in grad school I was way too busy barely staying afloat to be so meticulous about my education.
This is the correct way to approach the note-taking vs. paying attention debate. Most of the students (including me in my early undergrad days) come to classes with blank slates. This forces your brain to be in panic mode when encountering new information from the lecturer by either jotting ferociously or not paying attention because, of course, the lecture slides will be posted in Google Drive later, after the lecture is done.
For engineering classes, I would rather invest the entire time in the class to focus, ask questions, and read the content from the textbooks if it's standard stuff covered there. The ideal scenario is doing it before class, but even going through textbooks on the same day and creating notes based on them works fine for me. During my pre-undergrad days while preparing for entrance exams, my teachers would ask everyone to just listen to the whole topic while they used to explain on the whiteboard, and only at the very end, after the board was fully covered, would they give everyone 5–10 minutes to jot down the content in their notebooks. I really think that really balances all the classroom learning, but I have never experienced the same type of teaching philosophy elsewhere since then.
I also think that a particular type of learning style can't work across subjects. There is no one-size-fits-all. You can't study history the same way you do mathematics. Physics is very different from chemistry, and computer science is definitely different. A lot of universities (anything outside the top 10) in my country really got CS education all wrong. I see kids writing code in their notebooks. Mugging up random information. It's really jarring.
I opted for understanding as well. And my grades as an undergraduate suffered because of it. Understanding takes concerted effort over time and traditional pedagogy, especially real-time lectures, are poor at conveying understanding.
I wish I had had YouTube back in the day, or at least video recordings of lectures that one could pause and rewind to portions that weren’t understand on the first pass.
Yes, I look at note-taking as a skill that essentially is summarizing what you are listening to, writing down questions, etc. It should be an active process, not a passive one.
But this is a skill that takes time to cultivate. Writing down what you hear and then rewriting your notes later does accomplish the same task, and it gives you more time to do it.
Thats great but not when the lecturer assumes you already took the notes down before going to the lecture and spends less then a minute on each slide filled with forumals
The most effective use of taking notes is to actively engage with the content by figuring out how to organize it and what to include and what to leave out. Even though the author says to just capture everything, if you are doing it by hand, you are making decisions on what to write and what to skip simply because you can't write as fast as someone talks. One of the reasons taking notes on a computer isn't as good for retaining information is because you CAN probably keep up with how fast a professor talks and capture everything--so you don't end up actively thinking about what is being said.
This is a great use in the short-term. In the long term, you also need situations where you will apply directly the contents of your note. You can explain the subject to your friends or co-workers, use it as the basis for research that you are yourself doing, or synthesize what you've written down with knowledge coming from other books. This will keep you coming back to your notes, and you'll feel that your knowledge is increasing and getting sharper each time.
Exactly this. Focusing not just on what you write, but how you find what you wrote is very important.
I started using Org Roam a bit over half a year ago. My policy with deciding what to store in it is: "is there a chance I will want to remember this later?" If yes, I write it down, and link it to something relevant, which allows me to find it later from the backlinks on that relevant note. I thought I had pretty good memory (I still think it isn't bad for a normal human) but I have been surprised fairly often that some tidbit of information that I want is neatly available as an atomic note, and I don't even remember writing it.
Took me a while to understand that taking notes is a waste of time, but in France you are taught to go to class and mindlessly just write down EVERYTHING the professor writes on the board. And the professor will just spend 1-2h just writing with 0 interaction. It’s really sad and it’s surprising that we are good at stuff as a nation.
Btw this is university for you in France. Maybe we are good as a nation because everything before uni is actually good, and people who are good actually don’t go to uni but to grandes ecoles ? (Equivalent of ivy leagues)
The author specifically calls out why just being sent notes doesn't help, when some teachers do exactly that.
The advice is to understand, and consider questions while making notes. He has a section on when to ask questions in class.
The very next line after the one you quoted explain why he errs towards the former, but it does not say you should not concentrate, you should not try to understand, and you should not ask questions.
There is absolutely time to do all three. He even suggests ways of making notes in a condensed way. If you're actively listening, thinking about what you're writing, you're dealing with the level of understanding appropriate to have in that moment.
I did the same. Always listened ti lectures only (or skipped them) and then took meticulous noyes based on the textbook chalters covered. This usually was essentially rewriting the content of those chapters in my own words in while sentance and never using pronouns or bullet lists (this is important)
I found this to be an ibcredibly effective learning technique
Note-taker here. Actually, I had to really do my best to only focus on writing everything down. When I tried understanding the stuff being taught I got involved in an inner monologue trying to solve my own question and by the time I snap back to reality I missed a chunk of what was being said.
Did nobody else have this problem?
The line I always heard about that was that just by taking notes you'll remember and process more of the content, even if you don't review them later. I think for some content this was true for me, but it definitely wasn't universal.
I always always erred on the latter. I was definitely in the minority. It took me ages to work out why nobody else ever asked questions (or challenged errors).
They were just writing stuff down to process later. I have never understood it, it seems so obviously like a wasted opportunity. At that point why go to class at all, you could just get sent notes!