| Check out 'The psychology of effective studying' by Paul Penn. Thought it was going to be dry but actually pretty helpful. He goes through study techniques and backs up their effectiveness by discussing research experiments conducted around them. Chapter 3 is on academic reading and note taking. It's very good. Penn recommends the read, recite, review method. @Yvonne_McQ comment gave you some really cool ways to do this like The Cornell note-taking system. Penn's main point is your memory doesn’t work like a camera, so stop studying as if it did. He says you don’t reproduce information with your memory, you reconstruct it. Penn also argues that repetition is not the most effective means of committing information to memory. Thinking is the key to memory so he says if you want to remember something, work on explaining it. He cautions the reader with how we summarise. Not all summaries are equal. He gives an example by asking you to try summarise the story of batman the dark night. You could talk about Harvey Dent and the Joker being the pillars of good and evil and how Harvey becomes two face or you can summarise the film as 'Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill'. Finally he says to treat everything your trying to learn like 50 shades of grey. As in people picked up the book with an idea of what they want to get out if it before they started. They skiped over the content that didn't match what they were looking for. They extracted the good bits. When they put the book down it's the good bits they remembered. Read, recite, review. Check out the Cornell note-taking system mentioned by Yvonne_McQ and Check out 'The psychology of effective studying' by Paul Penn. |