<ul><li>Get a peer, tutor or teacher to give you written feedback on your initial learning phase.</li><li>Address one area of the feedback at a time.</li><li>Before exams and tests, reflect over the entire unit.</li></ul>

The Note Reflecting Stage

The goal of effective note-taking is to remember what you learned.<ul><li>It involves active learning, meaning the student is responsible for doing things with the material, such as reading, writing, discussing, and solving problems.</li><li>Students should also think about how they are learning it. What is difficult? How can you improve learning about this topic? How did your views change about this topic?</li><li>Students will forget less if they engage with their notes within 24 hours, then read their notes the next day, and again within a week.</li></ul>

Learning the right way

<ul><li>Review and revise the note contents.</li><li>Write questions in the left-hand column opposite the answer on the right-hand side.</li><li>Connect key ideas using colour or symbols</li><li>Exchange ideas with other students to see if you understand the material thoroughly.</li></ul>

The Note Making Stage

We tend to lose almost 40% of new information within one day of reading or hearing it, even if we write it down. However, when we take notes effectively, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the knowledge we obtained.

How to remember information

<ul><li>Write a summary at the bottom of the page that addresses the key idea and answer the questions from the left margin.</li><li>Build into your study timetable regular times to revise your notes for each subject.</li><li>Before a test, use the questions as prompts and answer without looking at the information on the right-hand side.</li></ul>

The Note Interacting Stage

Always draw up the page for notes the same way. <ul><li>At the top, write the topic/key learning objective.</li><li>Divide the page into two columns. The first column should be one-third of the page. It is used for questions and notes. The second column is for notes from the lecture, textbook, video, etc.</li><li>Take notes in your own words.</li><li>Leave spaces and lines between main ideas to add information.</li><li>Develop your own abbreviations and symbols to save time.</li><li>Write in phrases, not full sentences.</li><li>Use bullet points.</li><li>Highlight and colour key ideas.</li></ul>

The Note Taking Stage

This system was developed in the 1950s as part of a university preparatory course. There are four stages to taking notes: <ol><li>Note taking</li><li>Note making</li><li>Note interacting</li><li>Note reflecting</li></ol>

The Cornell Note-Taking System

We tend to lose almost 40% of new information within the first 24 hours of first reading or hearing it. However if we take notes effectively, we can retain and retrieve almost 100% of the information we receive.

The Cornell Note-Taking System

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