Get More Out of Your Notes With the Consolidation Method
To get the most out of your notes, you need to do more than just look through them. Merging notes weekly and before exams makes your learning more focused and proactive.
At College Info Geek, Tom Miller of the WTF professor explains that taking the time to make your notes look beautiful during a lecture is a waste of time. Instead, he suggests that you focus only on writing down as much useful information as possible, no matter how messy or disorganized it is. At the end of each week, you take your note pages, lay them all on the table, and start organizing them by concept. By grouping everything together, you will find the most important – or personally useful – notes and combine the lectures of the week into one page of notes. Miller explains:
Every time you reorganize your records, you do the same in your brain. You break down important information into chunks by linking it to your existing mental models. This makes information retrieval faster because you have packaged it more efficiently.
Basically, by physically consolidating information, your brain follows suit and these key concepts are better remembered. When it’s time for the exam, you will go through the whole process again, but this time you will combine one page of notes from each week into one page of exam notes; filled with only the most important information required to pass the test. There are many great ways to take notes , and it may not be the best one for you, but it is definitely worth a try. You can read more about the consolidation method at the link below.
Automate Your Learning and Build a Reliable Learning System: The Consolidation Method | College Information Geek