8 Ways to Use YourLecture Notes

Condense Select the most important points from your pages and pages of notes. Try to rewrite the entire lecture series on a single sheet of paper. Careful, it can get

crowded, but thats not a bad thing.

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Convert If you take outline notes, convert them to a concept map/ tree. Take the title of the lecture and put it at the top/center. Make the first indents the first “children” and the second indents the “grandchildren.”

Summarize

With each day of lecture notes, re-write them into a prose summary on a separate sheet of paper. Focus on the more important topics and mention examples briefly. Aim for about a half page for each lecture.

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Compare

Share notes with a friend, discuss the differences and explain why they are different. Fill in gaps and spend extra time discussing the overlap.

http://guts.studentorg.wisc.edu/

When reviewing your lecture notes, make sure you’re not simply reading them and “reviewing” the information. Use your brain whilestudying, not just your eyes. Each time you use your notes you should end with EVIDENCE that you have engaged with the information.

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Free-express

Combine summarize and illustrate. After you have looked over notes for one

lecture, fill a new page with the ideas, words, pictures, shapes, etc...whatever comes out of the pen. If you find your notes too structured, engage with the

material in this much looser way.

Keyword

As you review (along with other strategies) large sections of your notes, place a few keywords that relate to the material in the margins. When you go over the notes a second time, focus on relating, combining, contrasting, ordering, etc...the keywords. This will help organize the main topics discussed in the course.

Work backwards by focusing on the examples in your notes. Copy them onto a separate sheet of paper (or

flashcards) and study them until you know the details well. Once you do, explain what they are examples of and how they differ from other examples. Make sure

to work all the way to the top and connect the concrete examples to the abstract concepts of the course.

Illustrate

With each main point in the notes, draw a picture of something correlated to the topic. It can be totally made up, as long as it makes sense to YOU that the picture has a meaningful connection to the topic. Great for doodlers.

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