Description: Develop post-lecture strategies to maximize the usefulness of your notes and increase retention
So you've taken the notes in lecture, you've got all of the information you need. What do you do next?
1.Consolidate Your Notes
So the first thing to do is to consolidate your notes. So it can be difficult to produce comprehensive notes just from attending the lecture. There may be information that you missed or there may be areas you are confused by. So taking the time to go back over your class notes or reviewing the readings can help you to consolidate the notes you make.
2. Review Soon After the Lecture
The second thing to do is to review as soon as you can after the lecture. Effective learning of lecture content takes place when information moves from our short term memory to long term memory. But for this to happen, we need to consolidate what we've learned in class as soon as possible, before the information gets displaced.
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve as noted in this chart, illustrates that failing to review after the lecture has a detrimental effect on our ability to remember information. As you can see within 10 minutes of the lecture ending, more than 50% of information is gone and after 24 hours, almost 80% of information has been forgotten. However, the earlier and more regularly that you can review the lecture content the easier it's going to be to maintain a high level of recall.
If you don't have time to do an in-depth review of your notes soon after the lecture, try doing a quick review during the breaks in the lecture or maybe even at the end of the lecture.
A quick review could include:
- Clarifying abbreviations
- Highlighting key words
- Writing key questions that could be generated from the content of the lecture.
- Identifying areas that you need to seek further clarification on
3. Methods for a Deeper Review
- Many students will produce handwritten notes as they are often convenient, but reproducing those notes in a digital form actually allows greater flexibility. The imposing of further structure on your notes can also help you to develop a deeper understanding of the content.
- Summarizing your notes into an alternate format such as a mindmap, flowchart, matrix or brief synopsis forces you to think differently about the class notes, which can lead to a more meaningful, deeper form of processing which is more memorable.
In conjunction with information you gather from past papers and your syllabus, try to turn the class content into questions you could be assessed on. This process consolidates information, helps you to think like an assessor, and provides you with material to use regularly as part of your self-assessment.