How to Take Notes - Very useful for High School and College Students

How to Take Notes.

When you attend a lecture, it is useful to be able to jot information down to help you remember what you heard.

The purpose of note-taking is simple: to help you study better and more quickly. This means your notes don’t have to contain everything, they have to contain the most important things. And if you’re focused on capturing everything, you won’t have the spare mental “cycles” to recognize what’s truly important. Which means that later, when you’re studying for a big test or preparing a term paper, you’ll have to wade through all that extra garbage to uncover the few nuggets of important information?

Dates of events

Names of people:

Theories:

Arguments and debates: Any list of pros and cons, any critique of a key idea, both sides of any debate related in class or your reading should be recorded

Images and exercises

Other stuff: Just about anything a professor writes on a board should probably be written down, unless it’s either self-evident or something you already know. Titles of books, movies, TV series, and other media are usually useful, though they may be irrelevant to the topic at hand; I usually put this sort of stuff in the margin to look up later (it’s often useful for research papers, for example). Pay attention to other student’s comments, too — try to capture at least the gist of comments that add to your understanding.

Your own questions, write questions that come to mind that you'd like to ask.  Usually there is time only at the end of a lecture to ask questions.  If you don't write your question down, you will forget to ask the question.

Outlining: Whether you use Roman numerals or bullet points, outlining is an effective way to capture the hierarchical relationships between ideas and data. In a history class, you might write the name of an important leader, and under it the key events that he or she was involved in. Under each of them, a short description. And so on.

Mind-mapping: For lectures, a mind-map might be a more appropriate way of keeping track of the relationships between ideas.