Study Skills: On Taking Notes

 

Photo by Justin Morgan on Unsplash

It occurs to me with all of the bad news about AI in learning, that there may be coming a time when students need to re-learn (in my point of view) or learn-for-the-first-time (in anyone younger than my self's point of view) how to study.

I grew up socio-economically poor but...I was blessed with an environment that valued education, even if it somewhat forced a solo-journey through that education. (Said another way, I did seek and learn how to be a good student, but at the end of the day, only myself and God truly hauled my ass through learning, no one else did).

My great-grandfather sent his daughter, my grandmother, to college during the depression. I'm still amazed at that: a woman allowed to attend college during the depression using the family car. It says something about valuing education. I went on to graduate from the exact same college. This is not a photo of them--this is an alamy stock photo.

In hindsight, I was lucky to receive actual school class time to prep for:

• The PSATs
• The SATs
• The ACT 
• The New York State Regents Exams

Heading to college, watching the "Where There's A Will, There's an A" film (YouTube, 2:45:57) [Book, Internet Archive] was incredibly helpful. I've never leaned on highlighters inside of the act of learning, for example.

But scanning some of these articles about how students are learning with AI and other digital tools, I'm fearing that, like lost colloquialisms or story references, students have lost the basics of how to take notes.  Yes, I mean how to take notes effectively.

So I thought I would scribble down (ha!) some stories of students and notes from my experiences.

Hexane Ring     

Early in my faculty days, I received a frantic email from one of my students asking where the Chemistry book covered hexane rings. Since I had a lower number of students at that time, I remember grabbing the Zumdahl Chemistry book (IYKYK) and immediately flipping to the index. Possibly a little voice inside my head said "I know she has this book. Doesn't she know how to use the index??" 

Regardless, I spent 20 minutes composing a response going over all of the places where the textbook discussed carbons and hydrogen atoms in rings. Pressed send.

Right back, I get the response: I though you said the exam would only contain what was in the book. The exam had a question on hexane rings.  You just pointed me to pages on carbon and hydrogen rings.

I sat back in my chair for a moment.

I had to understand that she had studied chemistry for quite a while and yet had never understood that most of the entire depiction of molecules in rings were carbons and hydrogen atoms? As soon as a different word was used to describe this *basic* concept, she went crazy?

That's almost as bad as studying chemistry for a while and not eventually learning that "C" stands for Carbon. 😬

Besides teaching me to put her on an email governor because this frantic student needed to learn to use the index on her own, I learned that students can sit looking at textbook pages for a long time and still not learn much at all. She was, in the end, hopeful that word recognition alone would get her through chemistry. It will not. Not to mention that it's wildly dangerous to step into a chemistry lab without any understanding of chemistry. Given that she was a future Biology teacher, I had to worry a bit here.

Google Cut and Paste

Fast forward and we started to provide study guides to students in their courses-- these were questions meant to stimulate memorization AND deeper thought.  But they were never 1:1 correlated to questions on the exam.

In some policies, students were required to work with faculty if they failed their high-stakes exams. I would ask students to send me their notes and I would happily review them.

Side note: If they were cheating, this was a trap. Why didn't they understand that? 😕

In reviewing the notes (this happened hundreds of times), I would hone in and listen to the voice they used to answer the questions. Was it theirs or more specifically, could I find out if the voice was someone else's by hearing a voice change or even better, find directly wrong answers. In many situations, I could take a key phrase from a study question answer, google it, and find that the sentence had been copied and pasted directly from the Internet (and even juicier, I started to know what the top ~20 Google hits were for most of my questions, so I already knew where some of the answers came from).

One of our study questions asked what would happen to Moon if it's speed increased beyond 11km/s/s (or something like that). I remember laughing the day a student wrote back "It would burn up".  Points for authenticity! But completely wrong. We had never taught anything about any thing burning up in the atmosphere.  We did, however, spend more than one hour on gravity, the Moon, inertia, forces, 'objects moving in a straight line will continue in a straight line' stuff, and had a large explanation of how the Moon moves in an apparent circle around the Earth as a result of two forces: it's inertia and Earth's gravity.  If the Moon sped up, it would escape Earth's gravity and head of to...who knows where...Mars maybe.  If the student didn't pay attention during that 1+ hour, they might dream up that 'burning' answer. Or maybe they were thinking of meteorites (which we also did not teach in the course).

One time a student even referred to the depiction of the Great Lunar Cataclysm from The Time Machine (2002). 

I love The Time Machine as a story. But I don't learn my science there.

All in all, students would cheat on their notes - not really taking them, the notes weren't in their own voice (which the brain loves best), and they would fail the exam over and over. Until they made the notes on their own-- by watching the recorded lectures-- they would keep failing. It was truly a case of it would have been faster to study in the first place than fake it for so long.

BTW, what did they think I was going to do with their fake notes? Somehow find that they'd been studying the wrong stuff? (Well, that was technically true, but...) That studying the wrong stuff somehow justifies that the exam is...wrong?  And not the student??  Was I going to ride out on a white horse and save my student from...what? I can't make that make any sense.  It was a *complete trap* on my part. I never asked to see notes from any student that passed the exam. I was examining how bad of a cheater they were. Bad notes or not, they were failing because  they didn't know how to study notes! I just needed a door into the conversation of how to do better. Duh.

The plot went further in that students eventually would post the entire pre-assessment online at Quizlet including what some poor sop indicated was the answer to the questions, which earned a SOLID 72-74% (depending on which version of the pre-assessment the student received.) That's code for a high enough score (above 70%) to get automatic approval to take the high stakes exam but possibly low enough to remain humble (? I'm being really nice here, I just suspect the poor sop really was that bad at science).  The truth was often much more base-- the student just cheated by using online answers to take their pre-assessment, there was no 'studying' about it.  Again, the theme is "Not not smart, but don't know how to study."

So I had to engage in some 'challenging conversations' with students about how many of the answers in the document that they provided to me had answers that appeared to be copied from the Internet.  Verbal jujitsu to point out but not accuse. 🥋

Tried and true

To this day, I use paper notebooks. I've tried digital ones and just never took to them. I think that's because I have a few ground rules that work for me, but I realize one of the cool things about notes is that different rules (types of note-taking) work for different folks. 

One ground rule I have is: I don't write down things I already know.  Why waste space? Why waste my hand?  I don't need to "study" what I already know, so I won't write it down.  (I remember an environmental science course I took once in college where I went through the first three weeks writing nothing in my notebook because I already knew what the course was covering.  That was three very boring weeks.)

You might want to counter with "Well maybe taking digital notes works for me!"  I'm sorry to say, long term research says it doesn't. And I've seen that work directly in front of me with workers. 

Other ground rules: you do look back at notes to learn. But once you learn, you don't look back. Notebooks are used and then when done, tossed.  Digital notebooks can't do the same thing.  Digital notes can't really tell you how much you used this section or that you are always forgetting step 2 so be very careful (like notes in the margin can do). Digital notebooks don't bear the physical marks of how much you needed something and they also cannot physically reward you (with the toss) when you are done.

I'll write more on study skills over time.

In the meantime, get thee to a notebook, fast.