Page 300 - Learning to Learn

READING EXPERIENCE 10: READING FOR LEARNING
300 L EARNING TO LEARN: BECOMING A SELF-GROWER
your notes by sharing and combining notes with another person. This allows you to clarify points and
add any important omissions.
Highlighting
Highlighting can be an effective study technique, which makes it easier and
quicker to reread and review written material. You can focus your study
and review time on the most important material, spending less time on or
completely skipping unmarked sections. This can be especially valuable
when many chapters of material are covered for an exam. Highlighting
keeps you alert as you read. Highlighting requires that you make decisions
continually about what is important and should be highlighted and what
is not important. Effective highlighting involves a balance between
highlighting too much and not highlighting enough. Since it is much faster
and easier to highlight material (than to write notes), many readers make the
mistake of highlighting too much text. If you are not careful, entire sections
that could be summarized in one or two sentences can become bright blocks of
ink.
The following are a few suggestions for highlighting.
• Read a paragraph first before doing any highlighting. Try to avoid highlighting a sentence as
you are first reading it. Read and then assess what should be highlighted.
• Highlight meaningful phrases and the most important parts of sentences
• As a general rule, if the material is important enough to be in your notes, then it should also be
highlighted
• Highlighting should include key words, lists, definitions, formulas, and examples
Try these suggestions and decide what works for you. Whatever you decide, if you highlight, you must
be prepared to read and reread the highlighted lines to help you learn the material.
Note Cards
A good method for organizing information is to write your notes on file cards. Note cards provide a
flexible way of organizing and recording information because they can be easily sorted. Note cards
are especially useful for learning new terminology. Limit the amount of information on any one card.
When applicable, identify the source on each card including the name and the page number. Regularly
compare your notes to your outline to determine where you have accumulated enough support, and
where you still need to find more.
Assess Your Notes
Periodically assess your notes.Agood time to assess your note-taking is after a graded exam is returned.
Check to see how many answers to exam questions can be found in your notes. You can do this for
notes taken from lectures and those from reading the textbook. This process of assessment is how you
improve your note-taking skills and your future test scores.