Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!dykimber
From: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: Student preparedness
Message-ID: <5053@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 29 Dec 88 07:42:01 GMT
References: <52767@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Reply-To: dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 27

In article <52767@pyramid.pyramid.com> wendyt@pyrps5.UUCP (Wendy Thrash) writes:
>Taking notes during class need not be a rote activity.  I have found over
>the years that I learn much more when I take notes, even if I never look
>at the notes again.  I do not, mind you, merely copy down what is said
>or written by the instructor, but do some editing in the process, correcting
>his/her mistakes, etc.  I appreciate the discipline of note-taking; it's
>just too easy to space out otherwise.  A professor who can't accept that
>this is the way I learn is perhaps a bit too wise for his/her students' good.

That's interesting.  I only rarely take notes (largely because I haven't had
a class in a long time which really required it), but I've noticed that when
I do, I almost never look back at them.  Occasionally if there's going to be
a test, I may skim them briefly before realizing they won't help much.  I
wonder (this is a pseudo-survey - post comments) how many people take notes
and then toss them like this.  There's an interesting experiment or two (I
don't feel like looking up refs right now, but if anyone's really interested
I can get them) that show that memory for the details of a text is much better
if some sort of deep manipulation is required (relying on semantics), such
as re-phrasing a sentence, as opposed to surface manipulations, such as
re-ordering words, which only rely on, at best, syntax.  I haven't done the
experiment justice, but you get the idea.  I wonder, though, if this only
gets you a certain degree of comprehension, not the whole shebang.  You
wouldn't expect to understand a lecture just because you understood all of
the sentences in it, but you would expect to retain certain key concepts
better.  So it might be an even subtler problem.

                                                  -Dan