Students Dust off those Bic ballpoints and college-ruled notebooks — research shows that taking notes by hand is better than taking notes on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. Laptops in class have been controversial, due mostly to the many opportunities for distraction that they provide online shopping, browsing Reddit, or playing solitaire, just to name a few. But few studies have examined how effective laptops are for the students who diligently take notes.
If you take notes efficiently, you can read with more understanding and also save time and frustration when you come to write your paper. These are three main principles 1. Know what kind of ideas you need to record Focus your approach to the topic before you start detailed research.
Then you will read with a purpose in mind, and you will be able to sort out relevant ideas.
First, review the commonly known facts about your topic, and also become aware of the range of thinking and opinions on it.
Review your class notes and textbook and browse in an encyclopaedia or other reference work. Try making a preliminary list of the subtopics you would expect to find in your reading. These will guide your attention and may come in handy as labels for notes.
Choose a component or angle that interests you, perhaps one on which there is already some controversy. Now formulate your research question.
It should allow for reasoning as well as gathering of information—not just what the proto-Iroquoians ate, for instance, but how valid the evidence is for early introduction of corn.
You may even want to jot down a tentative thesis statement as a preliminary answer to your question. See Using Thesis Statements.
Then you will know what to look for in your research reading: Plan therefore to invest your research time in understanding your sources and integrating them into your own thinking. Your note cards or note sheets will record only ideas that are relevant to your focus on the topic; and they will mostly summarize rather than quote.
Copy out exact words only when the ideas are memorably phrased or surprisingly expressed—when you might use them as actual quotations in your essay. Otherwise, compress ideas in your own words.
Paraphrasing word by word is a waste of time. Choose the most important ideas and write them down as labels or headings. Then fill in with a few subpoints that explain or exemplify.
Label your notes intelligently Whether you use cards or pages for note-taking, take notes in a way that allows for later use.
Keep a format guide handy see Documentation Formats. Try as far as possible to put notes on separate cards or sheets. This will let you label the topic of each note. Not only will that keep your notetaking focussed, but it will also allow for grouping and synthesizing of ideas later.
It is especially satisfying to shuffle notes and see how the conjunctions create new ideas—yours.
These comments can become a virtual first draft of your paper.Apr 17, · Taking Notes By Hand May Be Better Than Digitally, Researchers Say Researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel M. Oppenheimer found that students .
Hence, having notes to fall back on for review is essential for attaining good grades. Notetaking, in addition to helping retention, allows students to become effective learners.
You will use research note cards to collect all the information necessary to write your term paper--which includes the details you need for your bibliography notes. You should take extreme care as you create these note cards, because any time you leave out a single detail, you are creating more work for yourself.
Take notes and post initiativeblog.comg this article and taking notes should take approximately 15 minutes This is property of initiativeblog.com We are the first stop for all students Buying research papers online.
TAKING NOTES FOR THE RESEARCH PAPER. METHOD A.
1. BEFORE BEGINNING TO TAKE NOTES, YOU SHOULD: Read generally on your subject so you can limit it . Taking notes allows you to make sense of the material you’re reading and consider how it relates to the topic and point of view you will lay out in your paper. Regardless of the type of documents you use, you should note certain elements after you’ve created your summary and are ready to re-read the document.